Venomous Lumpsucker
WINNER of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2023
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4.6 • 11 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*SUNDAY TIMES SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF THE YEAR*
'A novel that delights, dazzles and moves in equal measure' Financial Times
'Brutally satirical and grimly hilarious' Daily Mail
The venomous lumpsucker is the most intelligent fish on the planet. Or maybe it was the most intelligent fish on the planet. Because it might have just gone extinct. Nobody knows. And nobody really cares, either. Except for two people.
Mining executive Mark Halyard has a prison cell waiting for him if that fish is gone for good, and biologist Karin Resaint needs it for her own darker purposes. They don't trust each other an inch, but they're left with no choice but to team up in search of the lumpsucker. And as they journey across the strange landscapes of near-future Europe - a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the Baltic Sea; the lethal hinterlands of a totalitarian state - they're drawn into a conspiracy far bigger than one ugly little fish.
'A laugh-out-loud novel about mass extinction (yes, really)' Sunday Times
'Confirms his reputation as one of the foremost satirists of his generation' The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beauman (The Teleportation Accident) returns with an ambitious techno-thriller set in a dystopian near future in which evil corporations vie for profits drawn from the digital storage of extinct species. Mark Halyard, an environmental impact coordinator for a mining company, has finagled an illegal short sale of extinction credits, which must be purchased to destroy a species. However, a cyberattack occurs that drives up the price of extinction credits, leading Mark to seek out Karin Resaint, a species intelligence evaluator, to avoid getting caught. It's complicated, but Halyard will be outed if Resaint turns in her report concluding that the venomous lumpsucker is the most highly evolved fish on the planet and is too intelligent to eradicate, so he decides to join her in her pursuit to save them. The pair pick up a mermaid and a techie along the way, each with their own motivations, and there ensues a race involving a Jetsons-worthy, fungi-encrusted flying vehicle to the tragicomic finish. It can be exhausting to keep up with the wild geopolitical worldbuilding, but the author lays out a blisteringly scathing indictment of capitalism and climate change, and by the end, the implications about the future of AI boggle the mind. Beauman has an impressive intellectual bandwidth, though the ideas carry a bit more weight than the story.
Customer Reviews
Hilariously weird / weirdly hilarious
A dark sci-fi satire about market-based solutions to biodiversity loss? Bauman somehow makes it work. This is caustic, acutely observed and very, very funny. The story weaves in AI, rogue biotech and the self-destruction of the UK, but fundamentally it’s driven by the moral outrage that is extinction. With that spine the jokes, as dark as they are, never come off as cynical.