By Ned Beauman
I read this in a few days at the start of March, 2024.
It’s fundamentally an extinction/climate crisis novel, but it’s really funny and satirical to the point of despair.
One of the main characters, Resaint, works as a species intelligence evaluator, determining whether a species would cost one extinction credit to wipe out, or thirteen. Extinction credits originated in China’s attempt to stop the extinction crisis after a fungal infection caused by rising temperatures wiped giant pandas out. Corporate lobbying watered down the proposal to make it a free market, with extinction credits much like carbon credits.
She’s so horrified by the extinction of ten thousand species a year that she’s looking for an animal, any animal, which is intelligent enough to grasp what we have done and therefore take revenge on her, absolving her. It’s up in the air whether or not this is a post-hoc rationalisation of her suicidal tendencies. The venomous lumpsucker is the species she is looking for: as a cleaner fish, it not only needs to remember and catalogue all the species it cleans, but also to engage in game-theoretic reasoning about whether to take retribution on a species (interestingly, not just an individual) a member of whose has eaten a lumpsucker.
However, the last remaining population may have just been wiped out by the mining company of the second main character, Halyard. He’s invested because he massively shorted extinction credits due to a new proposal by the EU. However, a cyber attack wipes out all data collected about extinct species. The idea was that if we have all the information, the species isn’t really extinct, so no credits need to be paid. Due to the attack, the price of credits goes up, leaving him with massive losses if the lumpsucker is indeed extinct and intelligent.
Together they visit a variety of places looking for the lumpsucker, ending up in the UK, by now called the Hermit Kingdom.
It’s less a novel than an exploration of the future, describing food becoming tasteless, the emergence of new pathogens (such as a fungus which has evolved to combat all computer vision technology, which is just a brilliant idea), the rise of extreme-libertarian seasteads, and ending with an AI.
The end of the novel is a really beautiful moment. Resaint falls off a cliff while escaping from people chasing them, and is eaten alive by various endangered animals who have all been gathered into one place. However, she is saved by the AI responsible for gathering them, who is now embedded and runs on the very fabric of the forest. Thus, she achieves her wish of being the target for nature’s retribution, and is then redeemed by nature itself acting as a higher intelligence.
Another part of this novel I found interesting was the denseness of it. There was an incredible variety of plot threads all coming together and influencing the story, which really made it felt fleshed out and plausible. The detail was almost fractal, and all of it interesting.
It was also fundamentally different to that other book about aquatic intelligence, the Mountain in the Sea. We never interact with the lumpsuckers. Indeed, they are only briefly shown at the start, and never again. All of the activity revolves around them, without their participation, which of course is a rather good metaphor for nature as a whole.
However, the book had less emotional heft than I expected - I think it was intended as comedic satire with undertones of devastating loss, rather than any sort of call to action. Nevertheless, a great read.