In a not-too-distant future, a worldwide commission has created a sort of cap-and-trade system to ostensibly slow down the extinction of species while allowing human development projects to proceed. As a market-based system, an industry has developed around extinction credits that often operates to game the system. Karin Resaint is a biologist trained in animal cognition—species deemed intelligent are worth more credits in the market system. Mark Haylard is a manager in the extinction industry. They come together when Resaint is about to report the venomous lumpsucker, a cleaner fish, as intelligent and a company that Haylard is representing just inadvertently destroyed what may be their only remaining breeding grounds. From there Resaint and Haylard are bound in an escapade to find another population of the venomous lumpsucker—Resaint because she cares about the species, Haylard because of investments he’s made. Over the course of their encounters with quirky characters and futuristic reserves, detention camps, and an artificial island of sorts, the value of species and the meaning of individual species’ extinction, as well as the definition of extinction itself, are brought to the fore. I am with Resaint: “And yet, despite all that, it was self-evident to Resaint that [a parasitoid wasp species] had some sort of inherent value. How could this brilliant, intricate, hilarious thing—the fluke result of an unrepeatable process, the legacy of some dizzying number of past individuals, all of them, in hindsight, striving unconsciously toward a single invention—not be valuable in itself.” This is a clever, entertaining story with some depth and complex characters. ( )

Pretty perfect from start to finish. Everything Beauman invents is plausible, from the political constructs, to the biology, to the tech, to the characters, and he makes great use of them all to tell a story that feels very real, very thoughtful, and so entertaining. Everything rings true. Humorous and horrifying at once, I hope nothing in it comes to pass, but I have a feeling it all very well might. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/venomous-lumpsucker-by-ned-beauman/

A vicious yet funny satire on global politics and the environmental crisis, sort of Kim Stanley Robinson but with sæva indignatio added. It’s mostly set in a near-future Europe from which Britain is (mostly) absent; the role played by the Brits become slowly apparent along with much else that is hinted at in early chapters. Written with passion and confidence, and you’ll be thinking of it for ages. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/10/2023151-venomous-lumpsucker-ned-beauman.h... ( )

Venomous Lumpsucker by English author Ned Beauman is a wicked environmental satire. Think Kim Stanley Robinson material in the hands of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, or William Gibson. When Chiu Chiu, the last giant panda, died, world leaders proclaimed that the “giant panda will be the last species ever driven to extinction by human activity.” To this end, they established a tax voucher system—modeled on the carbon tax—to reward corporations for protecting endangered species and punish them for any extinctions they cause. One way to earn extinction credits was to scan a living animal into a database that would allow the species to be repopulated—if reanimation technology is ever perfected. We follow researcher Karin Resaint as she tries to save the last survivors of an unprepossessing little fish, the venomous lumpsucker, from ocean-bottom magnesium mining. Lumpsuckers, by the way, actually exist, though they are not particularly venomous. She wants to prove that the fish is intelligent enough to make it too valuable to kill. This should be simple. At one point, she muses, “If you really can’t see intelligence in the ability of a shrub to recover from having ninety-five percent of its mass consumed by goats, maybe you’re the vegetable.” People value animals in strange ways. One guy engineers a new species of mayfly, the “yayfly,” whose brief life is one endless orgasm. He thinks he has thereby made “a bigger contribution to the sum total of wellbeing in the universe than any conceivable humanitarian intervention.” Take that, utilitarians. The novel is on the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. ( )