In this gripping and disconcerting novel, the venomous lumpsucker (Cyclopterus venenatus) is a Baltic Sea fish that makes a living by cleaning the teeth of larger fish. Like the tropical cleaner wrasse, it is smart enough to recognise itself in a mirror and to remember the quirks and identities of its many clients, the better to avoid becoming a quick meal for a cheater.
But unlike the cleaner wrasse, it is clever and social enough to gang up on a cheater and punish it with deadly bites. And like humans, it is vindictive enough to kill another member of the cheater’s species, if it feels outraged enough and thinks it can get away with it. All this makes the venomous lumpsucker super-bright, sentient, and worth money.
The book opens when a permit to make a wild species extinct from the World Commission on Species Extinction (WCSE) is low and falling. Its value in the market has stagnated because too many licences were handed out for free, in order to gain the votes needed to set up the system in the first place, and then there was too much gaming and politicking to make it stick.
The WCSE demands 13 licences if the species that is driven into extinction is an intelligent one. Thus the venomous lumpsucker’s intellect is of interest to the Brahmasumadram Mining Company, whose robots are even now sucking up ferromanganese nodules from the sea bed around the species’ last breeding grounds.
Resaint is a consultant to businesses needing to know how many extinction permits to buy. She is one of the experts and employees who administer the bureaucracy of extinction. Her job is to check an old report on venomous lumpsucker intelligence. This had forced Brahmasumadram to buy 13 extinction licences, just in case, and to hire a consultant on animal intelligence.
Rumours that Resaint is about to certify the fish as intelligent reach Halyard, a Brahmasumadram executive. The cost of the 13 extinction permits “would barely register as a line item” to Brahmasumadram, but Halyard has his own interests. He bought the permits on behalf of the company for EUR 67,000 each, but then sold them personally, and illegally, in the belief that the WCSE was about to relax its rules.
The rule change would allow DNA samples, behavioural records and biometric scans of species stored in six Biobases to substitute for living creatures. This would make extinction potentially reversible and much harder to certify. Rumours of the new arrangement have already driven the price down to EUR 38,432, and Halyard expects it to fall much further. He plans to buy back the company’s 13 licences for peanuts, and pocket the difference.
But someone then destroys all six Biobases and their records of 19,000 species. Panic buying drives the price of an extinction permit relentlessly towards EUR 800,000. Halyard realises that he might cover the cost of replacing one permit, but not all 13, so the venomous lumpsucker must neither be certified as intelligent nor allowed to go extinct.
The stakes are raised when Brahmasumadram’s machines accidentally destroy the species’ last breeding reef. Faced with jail, Halyard desperately plays for time and heads to the Baltic to persuade Resaint to change her report. This she flatly refuses to do, but the species’ apparent extinction is even more of an issue for both of them. So begins a frantic search by Halyard and Resaint for any surviving population of venomous lumpsuckers.
His motivations start simply but become more complex as he is drawn to Resaint, while hers are only slowly revealed. She had dwelled on the fate of a now-extinct parasitoid wasp, and has decided that at least one human must be punished for mass extinction. And this must be done by an animal bright enough to know the meaning of vengeance. She feels a duty to be that human, and yearns to be sacrificed by venomous lumpsuckers.
But this quest can only be fulfilled if they are alive. So Halyard and Resaint criss-cross Europe, following clues to surviving populations of venomous lumpsuckers. Sanctuary North is the first stop, a private reserve in Estonia where endangered species are rescued from extinction. This is funded by credits from the WCSE, but their low value has forced it to rent storage for toxic waste. The barrels have leaked, and the venomous lumpsucker ponds are now dead.
Next up is Surface Wave, an offshore city in the Baltic, beneath which venomous lumpsuckers are thriving until they are poisoned by the city authorities. The search leads at last to the English West Country, which has been bought by the world’s richest man as a place for the last of every species to be used in the service of his own narcissism.
Along the way we discover that the UK is now known as the Hermit Kingdom. It has cancelled its treaty commitments, sealed its borders, and mined the Channel against humanitarian aid from the EU. And the US is mentioned only once, as a place that is no longer named “out of sheer embarrassment”. These futures are entirely plausible, given the state of present-day politics. And meanwhile we are also told who destroyed the Biobases, and for what greedy reason.
By the last five pages, I still had absolutely no idea how the story was going to end. I won’t tell, but I will say that a strength of the book is in its detail. Every sentence makes sense in the context of the dreadful world that humanity is building, with 85% of all wild species now headed for extinction. It exposes the monstrous contortions of capitalism in maximising private wealth, while others bleat about ethical planetary stewardship.
It all rings true from the current climate change debate. As I wrote in Surviving Climate Chaos (Cambridge, 2021): “erratic progress towards approximate agreements on fixing the climate problem is the compromise that has been squeezed out of tensions in the UN system between everyone knowing that something must be done and no one being willing to pay for it.”
The atmosphere and skill of Venomous Lumpsucker is reminiscent of Stark by Ben Elton, the 1989 comedy about green activists trying to prevent a shadowy elite escaping on luxury spacecraft from a world that they have destroyed for profit. Like the movie Don’t Look Up, as simulations of doomsday these works cannot be beaten for excoriating wit and dismal wisdom.
Humanity has no ethical justification for exterminating species, deliberately or neglectfully. But this will cut no ice without a mass movement driven by the sacredness of nature and a willingness to turn away from self-destructive pleasure and consumption. Meanwhile, all we can do is seek ways to slow things down, to raise awareness, to promote precaution.
I used to argue to clients that our own species could nominally be valued as equivalent to all others lumped together. With an annual human GDP of EUR 100 trillion, the other 50 million species would then be ‘worth’ EUR 2 million each. I figured that a price tag on every species in their cost-benefit analyses would make investors think twice before destroying any of them.
But I never thought that markets could do this job, for the very reasons that the WCES is failing to do it in Venomous Lumpsucker. Anyway the idea got nowhere, since development banks care little about extinction. It stalled in the same place as the idea that GHG emissions must be priced and rationed according to what the living world can tolerate, not what people want to do.
Economic tinkering with extinction pricing can make sense, but only as a delaying tactic until people realise that to survive we must make peace with nature. This will mean accepting and putting into practice the knowledge that ecological laws outrank human laws. Reading and understanding the message of this chilling book is a good place to start.
© Julian Caldecott 2022