Venomous Lumpsucker: A Novel

"So, this is where I can start talking about trends in depth. This book is set in a near future where human-led environmental degradation and climate catastrophe are the central focus of the plot, and the eponymous lumpsucker is just one of the many critically endangered species being ruthlessly traded for extinction credits (a tradable stock-like asset companies acquire specifically in order to legally cover themselves should their resource extraction terminate a species). If that brief description sounds brutal, I can only agree. This is a dark, satirical, deeply angry book about our species. This is a book where the characters are deliciously unlikeable, the contempt for our powers-that-be is palpable, and the prospects for the future of our planet negligible; at least in terms of that narrow goldilocks zone required for sustaining the civilisations of carbon-based bipeds like ourselves. It’s also eminently readable, oddly hopeful at times, and very, very funny. I’d be tempted to compare Ned Beauman’s humour here to our sci-fi satirist grandmaster Douglas Adams, or maybe his evil twin. Science fiction is often called the literature of ideas, so yes absolutely I think we can make that claim. That said, however, I also think the conversation or clash between what is ‘literary’ and what is ‘science fiction’ is an argument that has raged as long as our genre has existed, and is perhaps one we should strive to evolve beyond wherever we can. When I first became involved with the Clarke Award, a big part of the conversation around our shortlists every year was precisely located in that tension between the literary and the core of the genre. While that conversation is likely to keep going in various human outposts until some point around the heat-death of the universe, I also genuinely think it has moved on. One sign of that is the publishing industry’s own willingness to cross-categorise books more—a decision that is doubtless as commercial as it is editorial if it means more book sales!—which is one of the reasons we’ve seen our submissions double in the past ten years or so. Put simply, more publishers are happy for their books to be considered science fiction , and you can see that in those shortlisted and winning titles from recent years proudly displaying the Clarke Award sigil on their covers and in their marketing blurbs. And coming back to trends again for a moment, I think that convergence is only going to continue and that the global challenges of human-led climate crisis, viral pandemics, resource scarcity, migration, and so forth are all topics we’re increasingly seeing explored by authors of every kind. They say write what you know, and so much of what we know now is on this—hopefully reversible—trend. And, of course, the minute you set your work even a few moments into the future, you are writing a form of science fiction!"

"The writing. I really admire the writing. This is a very different feel of book to North’s Notes . Again, it’s a near-future book . It’s set in a Europe where everything is still readily identifiable. And he says in the author’s note that he has kept the value of the Euro almost as it is in 2022, but with inflation so that we can do the arithmetic in our head—which matters because some of the details depend on there being quite large amounts of money at stake. But science has moved on a little, as has politics. This is predatory capitalism at its most predatory. We have two main characters, Karin and Mark. Karin is a scientist on board a research vessel. The eponymous venomous lumpsucker is a tiny fish that is allegedly supremely intelligent; Karin’s job is to find and investigate intelligent species, because the penalty for causing extinction in something intelligent is financially relevant, whereas the penalty for wiping out something unintelligent probably isn’t. So market forces apply to the deliberate extinction of species: it’s horribly cynical. We start off with Karin on the boat trying to find the venomous lumpsucker, then she finds herself locked into her cabin and her internet connection is down. Suddenly she’s in isolation and she doesn’t know why. “Ursula le Guin said: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings’” Mark is one of the least likeable main characters I’ve ever met. I was going to call him ‘morally ambiguous,’ but that would suggest he had good points when in fact he’s just utterly self-serving. The first thing we see is him dodging an enormous tumour being hurled at him be eco-terrorists, who grow these massive tumours and throw them around. Trust me, it completely makes sense within the confines of the book; or at least, it does by the end. Gradually we discover Mark works for a kind of bio-engineering company. He made a bet with the company’s money on what was essentially a DNA bank of all the things likely to become extinct, so the company wouldn’t get fined for destroying their last habitat in a deep-sea mining operation. It was going okay until somebody destroyed the bank in an act of terrorism—and now he needs the venomous lumpsucker not to be extinct or he’ll go to prison. Karin is decent but yet she’s being employed by the mining company that wants to destroy the lumpsucker’s last habitat, to prove that it’s not the last habitat so they can go ahead and destroy it. So these two end up working together to try to find the last surviving venomous lumpsuckers with the clock ticking and Mark likely to go to prison – and though he’s such a callow individual, it’s hard not to like him—and Karin is facing her own inner demons that gradually unfold. This is the clever thing. Apart from the genuine humour in the writing—deeply black, but still laugh-out-loud funny—the narrative feels like a very clever piece of origami that opens to reveal many layers. Just when we think we know what’s happening, we find another layer to peel back and there’s a completely different picture underneath. Then there’s another layer and another and another… It’s cleverly done and so plausible. It’s harsher than Notes from the Burning Age , but it also feels as if it could happen next year, it feels politically astute. I’m not a big fan of dystopias, I said that at the top. I don’t think it’s useful to show people how bad things could be unless you offer a way forward to something better. And this doesn’t do that. So it’s not a ‘ thrutopian ’ book, but it’s definitely an eco-thriller, and it’s very readable."