The Last Trumpet Shall Sound

In 2023, the Campo Grande Treefrog went extinct.

There’s a very real chance that
in the not-too-distant future,
the elephant will trumpet its last.
(Image via Goodreads)

Its loud and distinctive croaking now exists only in recordings. It was one of hundreds of animals that disappeared from the planet last year as human-driven climate change, pollution, and other forms of habitat destruction ravaged ecosystems.

Javan rhinos, orangutans, sea turtles, saolas, pangolins, and elephants are all dying out. Make no mistake: this is a crisis that will have profound downstream consequences for humanity.

Ray Nayler focused his best-selling novel The Mountain In The Sea on this extinction crisis, depicting the extirpation of sea life from the oceans and its impact on humans. But despite the grim subject, the book offers an undercurrent of hope. His new novella The Tusks of Extinction acts as a darker, angrier, possibly necessary counterpoint to the earlier work.

“The Mountain in the Sea had its roots in the ecological preservation work I engaged in in Vietnam. That work was preventative and positive, working with youth and with environmental activists to protect the Con Dao Archipelago,” Nayler explained by email in early January. “The Tusks of Extinction has its roots in my experiences in Vietnam dealing with the illegal ivory trade and the trade in rhino horn. That work exposed me to the grimmest realities of human greed, ignorance, and exploitation. The enormity of the slaughter of elephants and rhinos for the sake of useless trinkets and the stupidest pseudo-medicinal ideas.”

The result is an uncomfortable read that will resonate with many and deserves serious consideration in every award category for which it is eligible. It’s science fiction deeply rooted in truth … and the current truth hurts.

As the book begins, scientists are recreating mammoths as a last ditch effort to keep the elephantidae family in existence. Siberia provides isolated stretches of open country, improving the odds for the wild megafauna. Since elephants — and their mammoth cousins — depend on generational knowledge to survive in the wild, the project is forced to recruit the recorded consciousness of a long-dead elephant conservation activist and researcher.

The novella follows three narrators who offer differing perspectives on an attempt to reintroduce the wooly mammoth into the wild: murdered elephant researcher Dr. Damira Khismatullina, uploaded into a mammoth matriarch; young apprentice poacher Syvatoslav; and ultra-rich big-game hunter’s spouse Vladimir.

About 100 African elephants are killed every day
to fuel the illegal trade in ivory. The villain — as is
often the case — is rapacious unchecked capitalism.
(Image via Science.org)

The protagonists are tragic figures; Svyatoslav is the son of a callous and violent hunter who cares for little other than money. Although he feels revulsion at the senseless slaughter, economic hardship and cultural pressure force him to participate. Vladimir is in a relationship with someone who thinks his apex capitalist money can buy love, and Damira has seen her life’s work destroyed by rapacious capitalism.

While humanity’s role in mass extinction is the main theme of the novella, an important sub theme is the relationship between senses, memory, and self identity. After her resurrection in the mammoth, Damira’s experience of the world is radically different, as is her relationship with memory. Assumptions about mind-body dualism are baked into the SF trope of uploading consciousness, and it’s refreshing to see these assumptions challenged.

“In a large part, The Tusks of Extinction is an exploration of the embodiment of mind, and also of the physical reality — the enormity — of our embodiment in the world,” Nayler says. “The mental changes Damira undergoes as a mammoth are a rebuttal of the idea of mind as separate from body and the sensory apparatus. The Tusks of Extinction is an expression of my anti-Cartesian view of the world. We exist in a physical body which exists in an ecosystem. The idea that we are floating intellects which can do as we will is one of the most damaging in human history: our lives are contingent, at all times, on physical reality and our place in it. The realization of that demands a corresponding ethics.”

The rationale behind the fictional project is expertly mapped out; research has shown that wooly mammoths enabled arctic ecosystems to store more CO2 than they otherwise would have. Having the mammoths back in the environment would disperse seeds, and increase resilience to climate change. Nayler gets the details right, and this helps make his larger arguments more believable and compelling.

Grounded in his experiences, Nayler offers insights about the social and economic conditions that lead to poaching. Svyatoslav, for example, is written with compassion and in a way that reflects on the endurance of those who lack the power to change a system that does not value their lives.

Hitting bookstore shelves during a decade when a significant portion of the SFF community seems to be seeking out comfort reads and hopepunk, The Tusks of Extinction may not appeal to all genre readers. But sometimes, sorrow is warranted and sometimes, there’s value in righteous anger.

It’s worth being angry about the potential loss of 44,000 species. As Nayler puts it: “We are intellectual animals with grand capacities, capable of living ethically and morally. It's time we used our brains to act in ways that prove we deserve to be on this planet, and that the human experiment is not doomed to be a destructive failure.”

We hope this novella finds the readership it deserves, and helps motivate some readers to take action.

Successful Mimicry

Given the character’s adherence to logic and to the scientific method, Sherlock Holmes has long been considered at least liminally a science fictional character. In various guises, and with thinly-veiled references, Holmes lurks in the margins of almost every science fictional mystery tale.

(Image via Amazon)

But science fiction is a difficult setting in which to construct a mystery plot. Drawing readers in to an imaginary world involves providing information about the setting … which is at odds with the ways in which mysteries must keep a reader guessing. Offer too little information about a science fiction setting and readers will not know what’s going on, offer too much information in a mystery story and the whodunnit becomes trivial.

With her recent novella Mimicking Of Known Successes, Malka Older provides one of the few examples of navigating that philosophical tension successfully, providing a richly imagined world whose politics and conflicts hit close to home, while also drawing readers into a mystery whose solution isn’t immediately obvious.

Set on a network of floating communities in Jupiter’s atmosphere centuries after the Earth was rendered uninhabitable, the book follows an academic ecologist named Pleiti who is dragged into a missing person’s investigation by detective (and ex-girlfriend) Mossa. The detective is renowned amongst her peers for her ability to solve cases from minute pieces of evidence; she is the person that they consult when cases seem insoluble. The case grows more complex as items are stolen from Pleiti’s university laboratory, and the two get targeted by an assassin.

Any story with a master-detective who has a near preternatural understanding of evidence working alongside a non-detective friend will inevitably be read as a modernized homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. It is a daunting mantle to bear, but Older carries it remarkably well.

Malta Older is known for policy-forward
and wonkish science fiction (which we've
enjoyed in the past). Mimicking of Known
Successes is a departure, but still excellent.
(Image via Robwolf.net)

Far too many of those who have sought to imitate or adapt Doyle’s stories have failed to grasp the centrality of the Watson-Holmes dynamic, often portraying Watson as a dullard sidekick who serves as a sounding board as Holmes expounds upon unfolding plot details. Older seems to understand Doyle’s work and character dynamics, imbuing the Mossa-Pleiti partnership with both a warmth and a mutual respect that fans of Arther Conan Doyle will appreciate. The fact that there’s romance between the two main leads is believable and more interesting because of that foundation.

When Mossa and Pleiti unravel the mystery, it is largely unexpected and yet makes perfect sense within the setting and the society that Older has presented. Just as importantly, the motivations of the primary antagonists are understandable, and easy to empathize with. It is an impressive piece of writing.

Given that Older is best known for her Hugo-finalist Centenal Cycle, readers might expect hard-edged and wonkish prose that delves into governance structures and alternate ways of organizing. However, Mimicking Of Known Successes provides something more similar to Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers books; something cozy and inviting that has hidden depths for those who want it.

Mystery and science fiction are rarely this satisfying when mixed, and rarely this much fun.

Monstrously Wealthy

It is impossible to be monstrously wealthy without being truly monstrous.

For tyrants they are both,
even flat against their oath
To grant us they are loathe
 free meat and drink and cloth
Stand up now diggers all.
(Image via Goodreads.) 

This is the core theme of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest novella Ogres, a fast-paced and clever little book about a world where the titular 10-foot-tall monsters extract rent from proletarian humans.

Told in the second-person, the story follows Torquell, the son of a rural village headsman, whose life gets turned upside down after he makes the mistake of having an altercation with the son of the Ogre noble who oversees his village, and is forced to flee into the wider world. Through Torquell’s eyes, readers are taken on a tour of this society, seeing factory towns, exploited military regiments, and Ogre high society.

Nuanced, iterative worldbuilding reveals a complex set of social relations, despite an initially obvious – and blunt – metaphor about inequality.

Ogres may be one of the most overtly leftist pieces of mainstream SFF published in the past 50 years; it is clearly informed by Enclosure Acts-era British rent seeking, by Dickensian living conditions, by The Sound Of His Horn, and by Marxist theory. This is not Marxist in the pop-culture understanding of the word, but informed by the academic intellectual framework.

This theoretical underpinning is evident in the ways societal structures reinforce the Ogres’ control, and maintain economic disparity. The use of religion as a tool for maintaining the compliance of economically disadvantaged people is particularly striking. Likewise, the way that “economic” is used as a pejorative by the Ogres highlights the philosophical stance of the book, as well as how the Ogres think about humans.

By the end, it is clear that what makes the Ogres monstrous isn’t their enormous size or their strength, but rather their wealth. Those who attain such heights of power and privilege are monstrous, no matter what their shape or size.

At times, the second-person point-of-view narration can come across as a bit precious. It is certainly not the standard perspective for most fiction, and this may present an impediment for some readers. But once the story gets going, this quirk of prose style becomes less and less obtrusive, and by the book’s conclusion it is evident why the second-person voice was necessary.

Tchaikovsky's Ogres
may be his most 
political work yet, and
is among his best.
(Image via Pan MacMillan)

While this isn’t the easily accessible prose that Tchaikovsky’s fans have come to expect, it is just as rich as his other works. For example, the book is filled with some excellent turns of phrase such as a line in which someone is described as “used to weighing others by the amount of world they displace.”

At the risk of offering a relatively mild spoiler, the second-person perspective pays off in the last 10 pages in a note-perfect and unexpected recontextualization of the entire narrative. Portions of the denouement that seemed improbable or overly convenient were put in sharp focus — and improved — by this conclusion. It was the sort of ending that may prompt re-reads of the work for those who want to find all the little clues throughout. If we had our way, it would be included in a creative writing curriculum.

Over the course of several of his most recent novellas (Elder Race, Expert Champion, Ogres), Tchaikovsky has explored various iterations of Clark’s Law. In Ogres, he goes one further and shows that while sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, sufficiently advanced inequality is indistinguishable from grimdark fiction.

Science fiction and fantasy are at their best when something real is reflected through unreal worlds. The monstrous nature of Ogres is effective because it is so real.

Witches Of The World Unite!

Themes of women’s liberty, worker solidarity and resistance to capitalism are all addressed in The

(Image via Goodreads)

Factory Witches of Lowell, a lovely novella by C.S. Malerich about a 19th-Century cotton workers union.

The story follows union organizer Judith and her witch coworker Hannah as they organize the women factory workers into a labour union to oppose Mr. Boott, the agent of the capitalists back in Boston.

Hannah casts a spell with the cooperation of the other factory girls that will enforce solidarity among the workers. None of them can break the strike without the cooperation of all the workers. Solidarity being perhaps the most useful tool among the working class, this is very powerful magic indeed.

Of particular note is how magic in The Factory Witches is inherently tied to a capitalist worldview, as it is impossible to cast a spell without ownership of the spell components. This draws into question the very nature of ownership over intellectual property and its theft.

Mr. Boott, as an agent of wealthier men back in the city, is doing all he can to ensure the highest profits for his principals. He raises the cost of rent, threatens lower wages and longer hours. He squeezes the workers to ensure profit stays where it belongs, with the wealthy owners. He is the clear villain as he attempts to break the strike by the factory girls. He plays this role well and is a thoroughly unlikeable character.

Overall, the story is one with a good message and a strong narrative. At a scant 80 pages, it moves along quickly and provides a hurried resolution. While many SFF stories can feel long, this novella’s weakness is that it might be too short. This results in underemphasizing the factory workers’ struggle, and failing to depict the efforts that capitalists were, and still are, willing to make to break a strike and the power of unions.

It’s easy to enthusiastically recommend this story when wanting more is our biggest quibble. We look forward to reading more work by C.S. Malerich.

The Bookcase Dimension

If you've ever been disoriented by an IKEA’s cavalcade of showrooms and design arrangements,

Cover design by Carl Wiens.
(Image via Tor.com)

you'll feel at home in the pages of Finna, the new anti-captialist portal fantasy from Nino Cipri.

LitenVärld (Swedish for ‘Little World’) is a fictional big-box chain of furniture stores whose flat-pack modular designs are displayed in faked-up little rooms. The problem is that the set-up is so confusing that shoppers occasionally fall through the cracks and into parallel worlds with alternate versions of the store. Some of these worlds are inhabited by carnivorous Poäng knock-off chairs, others by high-ocean adventurers.

Navigating this multiverse are Ava and Jules, two minimum-wage workers at odds with each other over a recent break-up. As they scour the universe for a lost shopper, they are confronted with possibilities, and paths not taken.

We’ve previously argued that the genre needs more stories about workers and workers’ rights, so it often felt like Finna’s clever lampooning of thoughtless corporate decisions and consequence-blind cost-cutting could almost have been tailor-made for this book club.

Not only does Cipri show the consequences of LitenVärld’s cost-cutting decision to eliminate its wormhole-defense department, they satirize mindlessly cheerful company culture through an evil hive-mind version of corporate-drone Swedes. The book is consistently on-point.

 Almost exactly 20 years ago, in his cult classic comic strip
Bob The Angry Flower, cartoonist Stephen Notley imagined
travelling to dangerous alternate universes while shopping
for a bookcase at IKEA. Until now, we’ve never wished
we could have followed Bob through those IKEA wormholes
and gone on multi-dimensional furniture adventures.
(image via AngryFlower.com)

What makes this work particularly well is Cipri’s deft ability to alternate between moments of high drama, low comedy, and fast-paced action. These changing tones give the book a sprightly rhythm, with the weightier elements made more meaningful by the author’s choices. At a slight 120 pages, Finna never overstays its welcome - several members of our book club powered through it in under an afternoon, deeply engaged in the storytelling.

Nino Cipri’s age is evident in how they write, with a tone that can best be described as “millennial.” The dialogue has a breezy levity to it that feels youthful and fresh. The use of they/them pronouns for one of the protagonists feels both meaningful and natural to the narrative (possibly because Cipri uses those pronouns themself.) One of our book club members said she enjoyed reading a book with a, “millennial voice.”

We approached the book with enthusiasm, and were not disappointed. Finna offers a compelling blend of adventure, relationship drama, and corporate criticism. This is an early favourite for our Hugo ballots in 2021.