A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.
Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.
Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?
Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.
Praise for Ned Beauman
“A premise as wonderfully outlandish as any we’ve seen in a long while . . . oddball and rambunctious . . . funny, raw and stylish.”
—The New York Times
“Amusing and rampageous.”
—NPR
“A singular novel—singularly clever, singularly audacious, singularly strange—from a singular, and almost recklessly gifted, young writer. This is not fiction for everyone. But for those who stick with it, it’s a wild and wonderful ride.”
—Time
“Wildly inventive . . . This fizzy novel is a great time machine all its own . . . Every generation gets the hipster satire it deserves. But this one's for every generation.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Gobsmackingly clever.”
—Vanity Fair
“Uproarious.”
—The New Yorker
“Endlessly witty and furiously inventive . . . Consolidates the 27-year-old Beauman’s stature as a formidably accomplished writer . . . Beauman flaunts an almost indecently pleasurable way with words . . . Dazzling entertainment.”
—The Washington Post
