Venomous Lumpsucker

May 9, 2022
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.

June 10, 2024

This is how it will happen, writes Beauman (The Teleportation Accident). His science mostly-fiction parable and fifth novel draws an uninterrupted line of descent between today's economic solutions to environmental problems (the recycling industry, cap-and-trade polluting) and the day-after-tomorrow's market in Extinction Credits, wherein countries and companies trade permission to keep eliminating species by the thousands. Listeners follow Karin Resaint, a corporate assessor of species' intelligence preparing to recertify the venomous lumpsucker's exemption from obliteration for personal reasons, and Mark Halyard, fellow industry insider, whose Credit embezzlement might have gone unnoticed if a computer error hadn't likely already wiped out the lumpsucker's last known population. John Hasting narrates these contrasted characters with nimbly varying effect and accent, encompassing Swiss Resaint's surface pragmatism and hidden despair, Australian Halyard's voluble defensiveness and much more deeply hidden grief, and a distinctly voiced international cast of allies and enemies met around the Baltic as they pursue any hint of a living lumpsucker. The adventure they encounter and fragile hope they find, packaged with British humor as wryly absurd as the fish's name, keeps listeners absolutely hooked. VERDICT: Bleakly prescient, yet entertaining. This is a treasure; recommend far and wide.--Lauren Kage

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.