Venomous Lumpsucker
By Ned Beauman
- Genre
- Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
- Publisher
- Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781473613553
In a near future where a market in 'extinction credits' lets companies pay to wipe out species, a mass data loss erases the record of which animals still exist. A cynical mining executive and a dogged extinction expert set off across a despoiled Europe to find out. Ned Beauman's satirical novel...
Ned Beauman imagines a near future in which biodiversity has been financialized: corporations buy 'extinction credits' that permit them to eradicate a species, provided the market agrees it is expendable. When a catastrophe corrupts the global database recording which creatures survive, a jaded mining executive and a prickly extinction biologist are thrown together on a road trip across a ravaged Europe, hunting for the truth about a small, possibly clever fish. Venomous Lumpsucker is savage comic science fiction, its gallows humor aimed squarely at the absurd machinery by which capitalism prices the priceless. Beauman's invention is relentless and his sentences fizz with ideas, jokes and inventive future-tech, yet beneath the satire runs genuine grief for a vanishing living world. The Clarke Award judges rewarded exactly this fusion of wit and warning. For readers who like their climate fiction bracingly funny rather than earnest - closer to Douglas Adams than to elegy - it is one of the sharpest speculative novels of its moment.