Back
Ned Beauman: Venomous Lumpsucker (Paperback, 2023) 4 stars

The venomous lumpsucker is the most intelligent fish on the planet. Or maybe it was …

Dry, dark, extinction-era picaresque

4 stars

A conceptually provocative, but often disjointed narrative, following an extinction offsetting industry professional and an animal intelligence evaluator as they follow the trail of an unusually smart (and vengeful) species of fish (presumed extinct?). Strong and sophisticated worldbuilding, but the characters (and their motives) felt a bit flatter, and Beauman's different registers of humour and satire sometimes felt like they were pulling in wildly different directions (with riffs on Brexit and its aftermath reading much broader and less illuminating than, e.g., his perspective on the political economy of extinction-era environmental offsets).