February 1, 2022
In the 2030s, the DNA sequences of vanishing species are being digitized and uploaded to a global biobank network, the better to revive them. Then a cyberattack wipes out the banks, and two men hunt for a surviving venomous lumpsucker--not a pretty fish but the world's smartest--across a landscape dotted with floating cities and toxic-waste repositories. From the author of the Somerset Maugham Award-winning and Man Booker long-listed The Teleportation Accident.
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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.
May 15, 2022
Won't you please open your heart and save the venomous lumpsucker? Beauman's quirky techno-thriller unfolds in a bleakly believable near future ravaged by climate change and dominated by an unholy alliance between corporate capitalism and ecological protocols. Our protagonists--Mark Halyard, a morally slippery mining company functionary, and Karin Resaint, a zealous evaluator of animal intelligence--join forces to protect the last vestiges of a parasitic fish species (the titular venomous lumpsucker) for diametrically opposed reasons as they navigate various nature preserves and hermetic think tanks powered by miraculous technologies run amok. Beauman is a deft plotter, and his characters are well drawn, with Halyard's panicked self-interest and Resaint's icy resolve striking comedic sparks as the pair desperately endeavor to preserve an unlovable marine species that, by most metrics, would not be missed if lost to extinction. The book's real strength is its ability to evocatively raise profound questions about humanity's relationship with and responsibility to animals and the larger environment in the course of its often (darkly) comic action. The worldbuilding is dazzling: Abandoned machine marvels called spindrifters randomly roam the ocean, causing freak storms; a research facility prized for its freedom from sovereign restraints becomes horrifically infested with insects; an oasislike reserve reveals itself to be overrun with toxic waste; and a government minister becomes a Bond-like fugitive assassin with the aid of a superpowered scuba suit, all under the watchful eye of a monstrous international environmental regulatory body that grants cooperative corporations "extinction credits" like popes of old dispensing Indulgences. It's funny--and chilling and terribly sad--because it's true. A dire warning, sick joke, and perceptive critique of a species of very questionable intelligence: humanity.
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