Venomous Lumpsucker

An imaginative, entertaining futuristic escapade with unpredictable twists and quirky, complex characters that yet explores some important questions about the importance of individual species and how we spend our lives.

What if extinctions could be traded like carbon? There’s an idea that doesn’t come up too often over dinner. It’s odd, awful, and yet somewhat plausible, as our hyper-capitalistic world keeps thinking it can buy its way out of physics.

Beauman chooses not to hash out the details in the Journal of Political Economy. He chooses to have it read instead. As you should, because I found the novel that fully examines this terrible concept to be terribly interesting, terribly inventive, and terribly funny. Not in a LOL kind of funny (though there are moments) but in the smirking,… show more.

Cli-fi is a tricky subgenre to nail, but if there’s anyone who can manage to thread the needle between furious excoriation of the human species while serving up healthy dollops of wit and wisdom it’s Beauman, whose boundless imagination wordplay is put to good use in this dystopian near future dark comedy.

The plot follows Halyard, an environmental impact coordinator and Resaint, a biologist, in a quest to find the last Venomous Lumpsucker. Halyard wants to find it because he’s been short-selling ‘extinction credits’ (something you absolutely know companies would trade if the infrastructure existed), and Resaint has determined that… show more.

This tells the story of a near future when mass extinction has driven the international community to negotiate a deal to save life on Earth. But this deal was corrupted at birth by the interests and opportunism of corporate capitalism. Woven around efforts to 'save' a fish species by people with madly different motivations, the book feels true while also being darkly funny, easy to read, and transforming in its power. It is all horribly familiar from my own experience of the deals that people and institutions have made to save the world from climate change. All of them are… show more.