レビュー要約

• 鋭い風刺と奇抜な発想、そして環境危機を笑いと不穏さの両方で描く筆致が支持されている。だが、アイデアの量と説明の多さに圧倒される読者もいる。

レビュー

• Brilliant, funny, sharp and prescient

  This book won the 2023 Arthur C Clarke award, what more do I need to say? It’s brilliantly written, sharp, shockingly funny - spit-your-tea-across-the-keyboard funny in unexpected ways and unexpected places. But mostly it’s an excoriating examination of a near future where capitalism has continued to run riot and the venal, self-serving hypocrisy has reached a climax of impossibility. In essence, the Venomous Lumpsucker of the title is threatened with extinction. Companies that render endangered species extinct have a (small, but significant) hit to their profits. But the markets have intervened to create a DNA bank which promises that they’re not *actually* extinct. So that’s fine. Go ahead and mine the last possible habitat, because they’re ’safe’ - until someone destroys the DNA bank. It was a fiction anyway, but it’s theoretical existence was providing a fig leaf for a lot of profiteering and now that leaf has been stripped away, some very powerful people are going to be pretty angry. Particularly if there’s a fairly low-level cog in the wheel who can be blamed for all kinds of things. Mark Halyard is the entirely morally ambiguous (actually, I’m being kind, he’s a self-serving idiot who made a daft gamble that has gone wrong and is desperate to stay out of prison). As lead character’s go, he pulls us either side of the line between pitying him and despising him. Rather more clear cut is his partner-in-uncrime, Karin Resaint who only cares about finding the Venomous Lumpsucker - said to be one of the most intelligent More-than-Human (i term them this, nobody in the book does) species. These two don’t have much in common, but they want to find the last living Lumpsuckers and their quest is going to take them to the edges of Network Sea-States and, ultimately, to an ASI that knows a lot more about what’s going on than any of the meat-packets wandering around thinking they’re in charge. I wouldn’t normally write a review of something so obviously dystopian. I loathe dystopias: generally speaking they’re lazy attempts to project the worst of human behaviour along predictable time lines with the fluffy moral excuse that if we knew how bad things were going to be, we’d change trajectory. This is quite plainly not true and the absolute definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result. So let’s not write more lazy fiction. But Venomous Lumpsucker is not lazy at all, and Beaman’s understanding of the various converging forces of capital, genetic engineering, libertarian fantasy politics and AI makes this essential - and highly enjoyable - reading.

• What a brilliant, depressing, hilarious book!

  I have no idea how I learned about this book. It must have been reviewed in some magazine I read but I can't remember which. Anyway, good thing I ordered it. The book is essentially a thriller set in a dystopian near-future where ecosystems are collapsing. There is blissfully little exposition; we discover the state of the world through the experiences of the book's main characters, and the situation is grim. All our main characters are involved in some way with the "extinction industry", a brilliantly and depressingly realistically envisioned group of firms that exist to manipulate and/or profit from a regulatory framework created around mass extinction. Beauman's inspiration seems to be the industry around the creation and trading of carbon credits, and he's clearly well read on the abuses of that system, and creative in thinking about how gruesome equivalent abuses would be when species are at stake. The end of the book is not quite as good as what has come before. A couple of characters have nearly magical technical skills, and this is used to resolve numerous challenging situations through a lazy sort of deus ex machina. But otherwise the book is smart, creative, and both funny and sad. An easy five stars.

• Laugh-out-loud heartbreaking.

  Simply first rate. Well written, weird tour of a collapsing ecosystem and economy. The best satire of the modern era I've read.

• A book to make you laugh and think

  At first I thought this was pretty silly but as I read on it also brought up some interesting philosophical dilemmas. And let’s face it, this futuristic fiction is coming close to being our present reality.

• Fun and light read

  Absolute riot. Definite recommendation

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