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.
With Venomous Lumpsucker, Beauman adds another triumph to his impressive literary oeuvre. For more than a decade, Beauman has been a singular literary voice, infusing humor into the darkest and most serious of stories. His debut novel, Boxer Beetle, won the 2010 Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction and the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book, and he was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for his 2012 book, The Teleportation Accident. Venomous Lumpsucker has been critically acclaimed since its release in July 2022, described by The Chicago Review of Books as a “gut-punching satire” and by The Washington Post as “dazzling entertainment.”
Ned Beauman’s Book Recommendations:
Flightways by Thom Van Dooren
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
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