Ned Beauman's VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER (Narr by John Hastings)

I didn't know how much I'd been wanting Ned Beauman to write some actual speculative fiction, preferably also with reduced Nazi content) until Ned Beauman wrote some actual speculative fiction that still made me laugh, bitterly. 

Venomous Lumpsucker is even more of a departure from what I've become accustomed to in Beauman's work than the above suggests. Instead of a history-less historical fiction, it is every bit as science fictional as, say, The Mountain in the Sea or War with the Newts. Instead of romantic and sexual obsessions, we have characters seeking redemption and atonement, both for their own sakes and for humanity's. Instead of biting satire, we have envenomed biting satire.

The title fish is an imaginary species of cleaner fish (like pilot fish or wrasse),* that, yes, injects venom in its bite, but more importantly, in its cooperative behavior the lone scientist studying them compares to that of Asian gangsters, it shows signs of significant intelligence. Maybe even greater than dolphin-level. Maybe as great as ours allegedly is. Or as great as that of certain Newts or Octopuses.

It is, of course, on the edge of human-caused extinction in the near-future world of this novel. And if its would-be saviors are anything to go on, it's going to go right over that edge really, really soon. 

Karin Ressaint and her accidental partner in species preservation, Mark Halyard, both work in the Byzantine new extinction industry, a complex and insincere global system that makes the fossil fuel industry's token efforts to combat climate change look, well, no, those still look horribly feeble and hollow but, well, actually, it's hard to say which is worse. Suffice it to say that Karin's job is evaluating the intelligence levels of endangered species who will be made extinct by any proposed economic activity in order to determine how much money the proposing enterprise will have to fork over for killing off the species. Intelligent species cost more. There is a whole system of Extinction Credits involved in this that I'm not going to mess with explaining here, but that's basically it. Our future global society, in Beauman's savagely jaundiced view, will have corporations, and thus everybody else, fully accepting species extinction as just another cost of doing business, while nobody even pretends to consider not doing the things that will cause extinctions -- and also a whole gross derivatives market built on top of the credit system. In which executives with inside knowledge occasionally dabble, because of course they do. 

Such a one is Mark Halyard, who works for the gigantic sea-bottom mining company whose next project will most likely wipe out the venomous lumpsucker. But since he and his colleagues game the system better than anybody, they're even less worried about things than usual, because they're on the verge of yet another successful attempt at changing the legal definition of "extinction" into something with bigger loopholes to buzz on through; namely that even if the last actual living member of a species dies off, that species won't technically be extinct as long as its genome, tissue samples, brain wave patterns, etc, have all been preserved well enough for them to be brought back to life, Jurassic Park style, in some theoretical future when we'll somehow have magically fixed up the damage we did that killed them off in the first place. Because of course we're totally going to do that someday, guys. It'll be great. Just wait. 

At first these two characters would seem to be at odds with one another, but as the plot ramps up and horrible unforeseen happenstances just happen to happen, they find they kind of have a common goal: to minimize the damage done by poorly controlled autonomous mining equipment and Halyard's ill-timed foray into playing the Extinction Credit Market. Oh, and an apocalyptic hack, but we'll get to that.

Along the way they visit corporate-run wildlife preserves (so underfunded but under so much pressure to succeed at any cost that the manager of the one our duo visits has secretly agreed to allow toxic waste to be dumped, in leaky drums, right in the middle of the Pristine Preserve), climate refugee camps (in which a gross new zoonotic disease has emerged that does disgusting cosmetic damage to cattle and the human serfs who herd them -- refugees are cheaper even than robots for some kinds of labor) and a libertarian sea-stead community that might as well be Rapture from Bioshock right before everybody gave it up for lost -- and that's just all in the book's first half. Because they're on the trail of a mystery as well as desperately trying to find other populations of venomous lumpsuckers; they're also on the trail of who or whatever hacked and destroyed the entire system that preserved all of those DNA sequences and tissue samples and recordings of mating calls and habitat data in one swift attack right before Ressaint and Halyard met up.

And every stop shows us more and more examples of cynical depravity on both petty and grandiose scales. I especially howled at a character met in Not-Rapture, a Professional Conservationist who funds his noble and legit operations by taking samples of actually endangered species and, with the help of a Mad Scientist, tweaks the DNA just a little bit, then returns the "evidence" of a "whole new species" to the wild to be discovered by habitat monitoring robots, thus earning tradable Extinction Credits when the government "saves" the nonexistent pseudo-species.

I mean, this is still a Ned Beauman novel.

Once again, the novel has multiple endings, and none of them are exactly satisfying, but I think in this case the unsatisfying endings have a definite point: tidy endings are products of art rather than reality; in the real world, we're all just muddling through and doing what we can at least half-assedly convince others is our "best"; nobody is really in charge; there isn't a plan; problems are never solved but only kicked, can-like, down the road. Anybody who tells you differently probably just embezzled a bunch of money from their employer and wants your help in laundering the loot.

Fucking Ned Beauman.

*Of course I only added that parenthetical note because I think "wrasse" is a cool word that's fun to say or otherwise use.