When the last giant panda died, the children of Beijing painted their faces white and black and ran through the streets weeping, and their weeping smudged the panda makeup down their cheeks until they looked, collectively, like a city of howling ghouls. A Beijing journalist published a column titled “Why I do not care about Chiu Chiu,” and was forced into hiding. The Communist Party banned reports on the panda's deteriorating condition during his final week because the news threatened to crash the stock market. One Chinese official, speaking at the founding of the World Commission on Species Extinction (WCSE), promised: “Chiu Chiu will be the endling of endlings. The giant panda will be the last species ever driven to extinction by human activity.”
This is not the plot of Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker. This is the historical premise on which the plot rests, narrated in flashback. The actual plot takes place about twelve years later, by which time roughly two hundred thousand additional species have been driven to extinction, the WCSE has been thoroughly captured by lobbyists, and the going market price for permission to wipe a species off the face of the Earth has stabilized at €38,432. More if it is clever.
Venomous Lumpsucker is simultaneously a parody and an earnest extrapolation. Every speculative element sounds, when summarized, like satire. Each of them, when investigated, turns out to be either already underway, currently being seriously proposed by someone with funding, or following so directly from a position with prominent contemporary defenders that the only honest response is to concede that yes, of course, this is what we would build, if we built it. It is the best novel I have read about the actual situation of being alive in the twenty-first century, by which I mean a situation in which one is implicated in ongoing catastrophes whose contours one can vaguely perceive, whose mechanisms one can sometimes describe, and against which no individual action one might take seems remotely commensurate with the harm. It is also extremely funny, in a way calibrated to the specific anxieties and frequencies of disgust that ACX readers will recognize as their own. These two facts are not separable.
Halyard
The protagonist is Mark Halyard, the Environmental Impact Coordinator (Northern Europe) for the Brahmasamudram Mining Company, and his governing passion is food. He grew up in Australia eating mangos so sweet they were nicknamed Groaners because you could not help making noises when you ate one. The mangos are now gone. So is the bluefin tuna, the maple syrup, the Iberian jamón (the oaks have a fungus, the pigs have nothing to eat), the bourbon (the heat is cooking it in the barrels), the oysters (the seas are too acidic for their shells). Real food still exists, but it has retreated to the upper reaches of the price distribution, where it is consumed by hedge fund managers at omakase counters costing several thousand euros per head.
Halyard cannot afford this life, but he pursues it anyway, which is why he is in catastrophic debt. He copes by taking a drug called Inzidernil, designed by an AI for some forgotten endocrinal purpose, which has the side effect of switching off the brain's evaluative response to food. On Inzidernil you can still taste what you are eating. You just no longer care that it tastes worse than what your parents ate. You sit there chewing a nutrient bar and it is fine.
But Haylyard has worked out a route to gustatory and spiritual succour. Via overheard conversation in an Oslo restaurant, he learns that the World Commission on Species Extinction is about to reform its rules in a way that will collapse the price of extinction credits, and he has illicitly sold short thirteen credits belonging to his employer. Unfortunately for Halyard though, circumstances unknown to him convert his insider trading into outsider speculation, and the price of extinction credits, instead of collapsing, spikes tenfold overnight. Halyard now owes his employer five million euros on a fraud that will be discovered within days.
His only exit is mechanical. If the venomous lumpsucker, an intelligent species under the WCSE framework, has been driven extinct by Brahmasamudram's mining operation, the company will be obliged to surrender thirteen extinction credits in compensation. They will then discover that thirteen credits are mysteriously missing from their inventory, will work out who took them, and Halyard will spend the next several years in a Danish prison. If, however, the lumpsucker turns out not to be extinct after all (if a surviving population can be found anywhere, by anyone, soon) then no credits need to be surrendered, the theft is never noticed, and Halyard goes home. He therefore needs the fish to exist.
His reluctant collaborator is Dr. Karin Resaint, the species intelligence evaluator who certified the lumpsucker as cognitively advanced shortly before Brahmasamudram's autonomous mining vehicles ground its breeding ground into gravel. Resaint also wants to find a surviving population. Her reasons are not Halyard's reasons.
Resaint, and the Black Hole
If Halyard is the novel's id, Karin Resaint is its conscience, though one that has metastasized into something much stranger and more frightening than the word usually implies.
Resaint is a species intelligence evaluator. She certifies whether endangered animals are ‘intelligent’ by the lights of the WCSE’s framework, which means she gets paid by mining companies and agricultural conglomerates to determine whether wiping out a particular species will cost them one extinction credit or thirteen. She is good at her job. She does not particularly love animals - she came to the field through an indirect path that involved washing out of a machine learning residency after the company's CEO publicly defended a contract to run detention camps in Kashmir.
Then, on an assignment in Western Ukraine, she encounters a parasitoid wasp called Adelognathus marginatum, which has a baroque and almost incomprehensible life cycle involving mind-controlling spiders into spinning specialized webs for its larvae. The wasp is about to go extinct because a sunflower oil company is switching to a pest-resistant crop. A colleague mentions this in passing, with a shrug. Probably gone soon.
And Resaint cracks.
The wasp is not cute. The wasp is not useful. Nobody loves the wasp. By every standard utilitarian metric, the wasp's extinction is unimportant. But Resaint finds that she cannot accept this, and the reason she cannot accept it is not that the wasp suffers (with only 40,000 neurons, unlikely) but that the wasp is. It is the product of ninety million years of evolutionary tinkering. It contains, in the structure of its tiny brain and the chemistry of its tiny hormones, a piece of information that exists nowhere else in the universe. And when it goes, that information will be gone. Not stored. Not preserved. Not reconstructible. Gone.
Resaint begins to think about what she calls the Black Hole. The Black Hole is the extinction crisis viewed as a metaphysical event. It is the steady, irreversible deletion of the universe's most interesting content, conducted by the only beings in the universe with the capacity to notice that it is being deleted. The Black Hole warps spacetime around itself, she says. Once you see it, you cannot see anything else, because everything else is small by comparison.
The only reasonable response to discovering the Black Hole, Resaint concludes, is suicide. Not as despair, but as accounting. If the harm is this large, and the only beings who can bear moral weight for it are humans, and you are a human, then your continued existence is itself part of the harm. The cleanest possible solution would be for the human race to commit collective suicide. The next cleanest, available to you personally, would be to commit individual suicide.
But Resaint adds a refinement. She decides that her death must not merely be a death. It must be an act of communication. She wants an animal, one of the animals whose extinction her species has caused, to kill her, knowingly, in retribution. She wants the species to understand what is being done to it, to understand that she is its enemy, and to take revenge. Only then will any meaning be transacted between the parties.
The venomous lumpsucker is, she believes, the only species on Earth that might be capable of fulfilling this role. Lumpsuckers are intelligent. Lumpsuckers are vindictive. When a client fish abuses their trust during a cleaning interaction, lumpsuckers swarm and kill it, and sometimes they kill the wrong fish entirely, just to make the point. They are, in her telling, the closest thing the animal kingdom has to a small organization with a developed sense of honor. She believes that if she can find enough of them, and teach them enough about what humans have done, they will kill her. And then, perhaps, something will have been said.
This is, on the face of it, completely deranged. The book knows it is deranged. Halyard knows it is deranged, and tells her so at length, in some of the funniest dialogue in the novel. But the book also takes the derangement seriously, in the sense that it traces out the reasoning with care and treats Resaint as a person who has arrived at her position through genuine ethical struggle rather than as a lunatic to be dismissed.
The Method
What I want to convey, and what is hardest to convey in a short review, is that the novel is not really about climate change in the way climate fiction is usually about climate change. It does not lecture you. It does not invite you to feel ashamed. The climate has warmed and various things have been lost, but the warming is treated as ambient weather rather than as a moral occasion. The novel does not want you to grieve. It assumes you have already grieved, or that you have decided not to grieve, and either way the grieving is not the point.
The point, instead, is to take a series of contemporary ideas seriously enough to actually build them out, and to see what they look like when somebody has finished building them.
The extinction credit market is what you get if you take seriously the proposition that markets are the most efficient allocator of moral concern. You can argue that this proposition is wrong, but you cannot argue that it is unpopular: it is the dominant proposition of contemporary environmental policy. Beauman has implemented it. Here is what it looks like.
The yayflies (which I will not describe in full, because they deserve to be encountered fresh, but which involve a factory that produces approximately one billion insects per day, each engineered to experience a few hours of overwhelming chemical bliss before laying its eggs and dying mouthless and digestionless) are what you get if you take seriously the proposition that aggregate hedonic experience is the unit of moral concern. You can read them as parody. You can also read them as a serious proposal that the novel happens to dramatize. They would be the wildest success story of the Shrimp Welfare Project. The book takes them at their word.
The novel does not editorialize about any of this. It builds the technologies, sets them down in front of you, and walks away. You are expected to do the ethical work. This is, depressingly, the rarest treatment available in contemporary fiction, which is mostly written on the assumption that the reader needs to be told what to think by the end of the third act.
A note on the prose, which I cannot let pass without mention. Beauman writes with a kind of compressed accuracy that approaches aphorism. The lumpsucker itself: “It had a toadlike face with bulging eyes and a fat upper lip; looking at it, you felt that if it were a human being it would sweat from the forehead all the time and yet have a shockingly cold handshake.” A piece of seastead architecture: “it had a kind of gaseous, ungraspable quality, so that no matter how long you looked at it you could never quite visualize it afterward.” The jokes are constant and the jokes are doing work; they are not relief from the seriousness but the form the seriousness takes. There is a long set-piece at a corporate dinner in which a tumor made of cloned panda cells is hurled at an arriving convoy by environmental terrorists while inside the restaurant a colleague of Halyard's quietly disintegrates over the suboptimal nanometer resolution at which his dead wife's brain was preserved. This is Beauman's actual technical innovation: he has found a way to write about catastrophe without flinching or wallowing, by routing it through a sensibility intelligent enough to notice that the catastrophe is also, in some lights, hilarious.
Climate reality
The world of Venomous Lumpsucker is not a wasteland. The cities are intact. The institutions are still standing. Flights still depart on time. Technology has continued to progress: there are functional seasteads in the Baltic, autonomous mining vessels picking nodules off the ocean floor, drones for every purpose, real-time translation in earpieces, brain scans for the bereaved, smart contracts that actually enforce themselves, geoengineering vessels patrolling the seas. The AI has not gone rogue. The financial system has not collapsed. Nobody has set off a nuclear weapon in anger. Children are still being born in maternity wards. Mortgages are still being approved. Most of the people in the book have professional careers and dental insurance.
The future in this novel is, in many ordinary respects, better than the present. It is also, in one specific respect, very much worse: most of the interesting biology is dying. But the dying is happening in the background of a civilization that has, by most other metrics, continued to function. The lumpsuckers go extinct around the edges of conferences and corporate dinners and quarterly earnings calls. Nobody notices because there is no particular moment at which to notice. The species just stop being where they used to be, and after a while there are no more news cycles about it, because they are gone and the news has moved on.
This, I think, is what distinguishes the book from almost every other piece of fiction about climate or extinction or technological catastrophe written in the past twenty years. The disaster, in Beauman's telling, is not an event. It is a trajectory, and at least for now, it is survivable.
The Black Hole exists. But black holes already exist in the universe, and we already live on a trajectory shaped by their gravitational influence. Whether one looks upon these ungraspable entities with awe or horror or both at once, the trajectory is unmoved. Trends continue.