Venomous Lumpsucker

We had pawned those animals, intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.

This is really dark and yet funny and yet, at the end still dark and yet, I still say funny/dark and I plowed through it at high speed.

The main plot device is the idea that this an earth maybe 10 years in the future where earth’s environment is degrading so quickly that ecological regulation is controlled using “extinction credits” analogous to “carbon credits” (eg with carbon credits you get money/tax incentives for planting trees/not cutting down trees and with extinction credits you are incentive-ized not to destroy species.) In any case, the rules are that if you extinct one “normal” species it costs one extinction credit but if you extinct a species which is “certified intelligent” it costs thirteen credits. (Yes, the central premise is flawed but IMHO, plausible enough.)

Our two protagonists are Karin Resaint, a biologist who evaluates species for potential intelligence, and Halyard (no first name ever given), a bureaucrat in charge of using and managing extinction credits for a large mining company. Resaint has just certified that the titular species of the book, the Venomous Lumpsucker is “intelligent”. Halyard is the functionary who has sold out the extinction credits that would be paid for the intelligent fish. And suddenly a unprecedented hack attack has destroyed all the world’s biobanks, a disaster with the secondary effect that causes the price of extinction credits to skyrocket, and therefore Halyard’s seemingly minor accounting fraud to also skyrocket in value (making the buy back of the sold credits disasterously expensive). That’s the setup. Halyard tries to convince Resaint not to certify her fish as intelligent and when that fails all sorts of hijinks ensue as Halyard attempts various gambits to avoid prison.

This story works because the personalities of Halyard and Resaint are entirely plausible, with Resaint as rational to the point of seeming autism, fatalistic but functional while Halyard is completely amoral but also just a normal guy who didn’t do anything millions of tax-cheats haven’t done but got unlucky. As well, the writing is funny because Mr. Beauman creates plausible but ridiculous situations for our characters to navigate (sorry I can’t just quote things - too long) Lastly, this being science fiction, those situations often revolve around science and technology being used in unconventional, amusing ways.

Leftists sometimes asserted that within a capitalist framework there could never be a solution to the extinction crisis that was untainted by profiteering and abuse, because the free market was like some malevolent AI, infinitely more devious than the humans who thought they could constrain it; but Resaint’s own proposal was simply that each of the hundred thousand wealthiest individuals on earth should be randomly assigned a vulnerable species and then informed that if their assigned species were ever to go extinct they would be executed by hanging.