In the not-too-distant future, twelve years after the last non-cloned giant panda has died, when biobanks of genetic data are the sole remnant of tens of thousands of vanished species, extinction has become an industry unto itself. A market of extinction credits – vouchers granting the right to kill off the last of a species – has made the eradication of the world’s biodiversity just another cost for companies. A cost that, thanks to loopholes and definitional workarounds, has become almost negligible. It’s a bleak future that, in the hands of British novelist Ned Beauman, becomes the backdrop to an arresting, cutting, and devastatingly funny story of two peoples’ quest to hunt down a very ugly, very intelligent, and very vengeful fish, the venomous lumpsucker.
Venomous Lumpsucker, Beauman’s satirical, vivid, tour-de-force fifth novel, follows Karin Resaint, an animal intelligence biologist, and Mark Halyard, an environmental impact coordinator for a multinational mining company, who each, for very different reasons, have a whole lot riding on finding any survivors of the eponymous species. Their mission takes readers across a Northern Europe 15 or so years in the future–one that’s been shaped by now-crumbling neoliberal efforts to rein in species collapse and climate change. From a biodiversity reserve that runs on revenue from extinction credits to a floating city that’s a regulation-free haven of biotech development, Resaint and Halyard search across set pieces at once both shocking and deeply believable. All the while, these two ill-matched, profoundly memorable characters debate the morality of human-caused species extinction and what cost–or even penance–we should have to pay for our destruction.
Continue reading Ep. 51 – Novelist Ned Beauman on Venomous Lumpsuckers and the Price of Extinction