The Tusks of Extinction

This book isn't even 100 pages long, so I finished it in a single sitting, and I don't regret doing that. I loved Ray Nayler's debut novel and this short novella was just as great, if not better in many ways.

He tackles so many serious issues with such sincerity and depth despite the length and the multiple character perspectives really highlight the positionality of different people in society and how it affects their views and what they care about and their memories. Obviously what can't be ignored about this book is the idea that you can bring back extinct species and the underlying current of the climate crisis and humans and destruction, but those issues weren't really at the forefront of my mind as I was reading--they only came later.

This book showcases breathtaking cruelty, but also a heartbreaking kind of kindness too. Very good. Will buy whatever he publishes next.

This sf novella centers on Damira, a conservationist who fought back (sometimes violently) against poachers, and whose mind was put into a mammoth's to help them relearn old behaviors and live again in the wild. It's a story about human greed, vengeance, memories, and identity.

I really enjoyed the writing here, but the more I reflected on this story after reading it, the more hollow it felt. It's hard not to cheer along with the book against different types of human greed, and the storytelling was enjoyable; at the end, I don't know that I came away with much more than that.

It's also unfair to critique a book by juxtaposing it with another, but I'm going to do it anyway. Having already read Lee Mandelo's Feed Them Silence it's impossible not to feel like that book tremendously overshadows this one, especially thematically. I think I would have enjoyed Tusks of Extinction more had I read them in the opposite order.

A fascinating story of a scientist and passionate elephant conservationist whose consciousness was scanned and later put into the mind of the matriarch of a group of revived mammoths, in the hope that she can teach the group how to be mammoths again in the steppes of Siberia. As the story begins, she discovers the deaths of several male mammoths from hunters. Thus, begins her own vendetta against the hunters to protect her group.

As the story develops, we learn the backstory of the scientist and the state of the world, where elephants have been hunted to near extinction for their ivory and other body parts. While mammoths are protected by the huge wilderness they wander in, they are no longer safe from hunters, unless the scientist, and the mammoth body she inhabits, can push the group into doing something they have never done before: becoming the hunter.

A story full of thrills, suspense, and a look at what a passionate person can do if given the chance the inhabit the body of her passion. But now, her choice is to decide what to do with body she has been granted.

The author's first book, The Mountain in the Sea, led me to read this, and I wasn't disappointed. This light novel, in a short span of under 100 pages, packs quite a punch. 

The main events deal with poachers, elephants, and their ancient cousins the mammoths. It speculates on de-extinction and narrates cruel events in a human greed impacted future. I was a bit confused at the start, which always happens to me when there are POV changes or time shifts, but by page 30 I was settled in the story and enjoyed a direct ride until I finished it.

The writing feels very well researched, it brings fictional events to a very near feel of reality –of what is and what could be.

Loved it 🧡

(em português: sol2070.in/2024/05/The-Tusks-of-Extinction )

American Ray Nayler wrote one of the best science fiction books I've read in recent years: “The Mountain in the Sea”. That's why I've been waiting for the release of “The Tusks of Extinction” (2024).

It's a 105-page novella — something between a short story and a novel — about extinction, biotechnology and consciousness transplantation.

In the future, mammoths are genetically recreated in a reserve in Siberia, but as the species depends on a culture passed down for generations, they don't survive as there is no one to teach them. The solution is to transplant the consciousness of a murdered elephant human guardian, in the hope that the pachydermic culture will be useful to the resurrected species. The complicating factor is that to finance the research, mammoth hunts are offered to billionaires willing to pay millions for the privilege of killing one. And illegal hunters are also starting to go after the valuable tusks.

I have a grudge about the cliché of consciousness transference, but the book is so good that I didn't care. The dive into the minds and culture of these animals is particularly moving.

It's not as good as the previous book only because of the smaller number of pages and the more limited focus of the story. But I agree with the publicity for the book, which presents Nayler as a ‘new master of science fiction’.