A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident. The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.
Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.
Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?
Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing,
Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.
"It's the near future, and tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. The loss is not total, though: the DNA sequences of many species are being digitized and uploaded to a global network of "biobanks," together with brain and body scans, recordings of behavior in the wild, microbiota profiles, and so forth, in the hope that the extinct victims of humanity's destructiveness might one day be resurrected. Then comes the day when the biobanks are hit by a mysterious worldwide cyberattack. Karen Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Karen is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Mark is a jaded corporate "Environmental Impact Coordinator" connected to the mining operation that wiped out the lumpsucker's last known habitat. This unlikely duo is left with no choice but to team up in search of the fish through the bizarre, dystopian landscapes of the 2030s-a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a migrant labor camp ravaged by a fungal disease; a floating city on the Baltic Sea; the dangerous hinterlands of a totalitarian state. The further they go, the deeper they're drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing? Virtuousic, profound, and effervescently despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best"--
