A creative and interesting look at how late-capitalism thinking could come for the climate crisis - a very compelling cli-fi read that isn't too heavy on the scifi elements.

Clever and witty, very entertaining sci-fi. This was surprisingly complex and intricately plotted, but not difficult to follow.

A clever, at times satirical novel with an almost James Bond feel towards the end in the way the protagonist was revealed, and the story reached it's conclusion. I never once felt that it was over my head, and similarly, it never felt dumbed down, or with excessive exposition. Hard to say as to whether I enjoyed it and rather think it would be an ideal book club read, as further discussion about the subject matter and the situation would to my mind be massively enhanced by discussion.

I love a good satire about extinction and human survival! This was an enjoyable read with the perfect comedic touches and a great writing style. My first Beauman novel but will surely read more of his!

Venomous Lumpsucker is a comedy about environmental devastation that asks: do we have it in us to avert the tragedy of mass extinction. This was definitely an intriguing and absorbing read. I really enjoyed this book.

“Everyone agreed that to lose an intelligent species was the gravest loss of all, and so, although such extinctions could not be prohibited outright — that would not be a nimble free market solution — they could be very sternly disincentivized.”

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Release date: July 12th 2022

Pages: 336

Representation: NA

Trigger warnings: Suicide Mention. Self harm mention, COVID death mention, rape mention, human trafficing, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, death, animal abuse.

Summary: Resaint is an animal behaviourist, and right now she’s studying a fish known as the venomous lumpsucker. In the eyes of her employer she has one job: declare the species as non-intelligent life so they can mine its habitat with no consequences. Except they’ve already mined the habitat, and Resaint can’t tell them that the little fish isn’t intelligent. Now it’s a race across the world to find another Lumpsucker before the World Commission on Species Extinction finds out what they’ve done, and they all get in a lot of trouble.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ Four?

I have a degree in Animal Behaviour and zoology, and have studied species in experiments similar to the ones Resaint performs. Prior to COVID, I was working with animals in hopes of increasing human understanding of intelligence. If there was ever a target audience for this book, I fit right into it. I have to believe that my background definitely contributed to my enjoyment of this book!

The premise the world was built around was an interesting one-exchanging credits for the ability to cause species extinction-and one that I could definitely see being implemented in our world. It was a realistic view, and following the two characters with opposing views fighting for the same thing made me love it even more. Both characters were interesting, and I loved watching their motivations and how it pushed them both through the story to the main end goal. Their relationship was especially interesting to watch develop. If we were writing in traditional tropes it would involve a lot of forced proximity and Enemies working together; some of my favourite dynamics.

It’s definitely not as funny as the marketing suggests; at no point was I holding my sides, laughing out loud, but that's okay. It didn’t feel like it needed more humour. Fans of Jonas Jonasson-Author of ‘The 100 year old man who climbed out of a window and disappeared’ will enjoy the writing style and humour presented. It was really hard not to compare it to those books as I read, because Jonassons books are the only other place I’ve seen something written in this way.

It’s a harsh reality check on climate change and the capitalist free market that we live with, wrapped in humour and hidden behind characters that just want to live their own lives as they see fit. Definitely one I'd recommend!



Its shining glory: It was extremely creative and has a premise that hooked me from the start. I wanted to explore more of the world that Beauman created beyond the scope of the characters we were given; that’s how intriguing it was.

Its fatal flaw: At times it repeated itself, which was an issue when combined with the long, informative sentences. It could feel like it was going round in circles, and the reader was really just eager to move on.

Read this if: You enjoy character-driven speculative fiction. You like adult reads that require active thinking throughout. You’re a fan of Jonas Jonasson novels.

Skip this if: You prefer plot-driven stories, or ones that focus largely on dialogue. You don’t like constant world-building or long-run sentences. You want something ‘easier’ to read.

“This novel is set in the near future. However, to minimise any need for mental arithmetic on the reader’s part, sums of money are presented as if the euro has retained its 2022 value with no inflation. This is the sole aspect in which the story deviates from how things will actually unfold.”

So begins one of my most anticipated summer-releases of the year. A speculative eco-thriller packed to the brim with satirical humour and brilliant ideas, that does at times overexplain its message a bit.

Venomous Lumpsucker is set in a disturbingly plausible near future, ravaged by climate change and overrun by capitalist mega-corporations. With ecosystems collapsing all around, the world governments must take action in the only way they know how: by enforcing protocols and financial penalties. Enter the Extinction-credit: a price to pay when exploiting an endangered species habitat. That price increases drastically when the species in question is deemed to be “intelligent”.
What began as a protective measure, soon became a buyable freepass to wipe a species off the face of the planet. After all, it’s only 13 bucks, right?
Until one day in the 2030’s, a cyberattack skyrockets the price of Extinction-credits, finally forcing “big-corpo’s” attention their way. This kicks off our plot following an unlikely team of a nature-conservatists and a morally bankrupt mining executive in a wild goose-chase through weird landscapes of this ravaged world. She, on a mission to prove that the titular fish is intelligent, he on a mission to prove that it is not…

There’s a lot to love about Venomous Lumpsucker, especially for fans of speculative eco-fiction (which I consider myself to be as well). The world Ned Beauman creates is incredibly well thought out: mixing the familiar with the disturbingly alien. Where once were lush eco-systems now lie toxic wastelands, and political systems built on ideologies now only thrive of monetary gain. It’s terrifying because it’s plausible… Luckily Beauman balances out these moments of acute observation about our near-future with some satirical humour that brings some light to the situation.
My only big complaint with the novel is that it did, at times, overstay its welcome a bit. As interesting as Beauman’s ideas are, not all of them required a novel-length exploration. The message becomes repetitive, edging on heavy-handed and at times dissipates the plot. The same goes for some of the passages about the animals that are on the brink of extinction. As an example: there’s an extensive description of the Adelognathus marginatum; the parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a living ant. There’s a fairly interesting metaphor in there, but a more concise reference would’ve been more powerful than the pages upon pages of back-story on this wasp that we got.
Ned Beauman’s message about greed an consumerism is clear: less is sometimes more. At times throughout the novel I wished that philosophy had been implemented a little more throughout the writing as well.

Overall, 3.5/5 extinction credits for the Venomous Lumpsucker; it’s very intelligent, but a little lippy indeed…
Recommended for fans of Jeff Vandermeer's Hummingbird Salamander.

Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

This a satire that deals with a serious topic like extinction. As it happens with satire you laugh even if the situation is more on the dramatic side.
The author is an excellent storyteller and I loved the humour and the style of writing.
I laughed a lot but it also made me thing and reflect.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is the first book I have read by the author - as excellent reviews in both the Guardian and the TLS (as well as other media reviews) have pointed out, Beauman’s writing is to a large extent in the genre of “systems novels” and at the same time rather out of kilter with an increasingly female-dominated (particularly in readers) literary fiction culture

As a one-time fan of speculative science fiction (for example Douglas Adams) but now as someone who almost exclusively reads contemporary literary fiction I found myself somewhere in between: really enjoying as well as admiring the intelligent, even visionary way in which Beauman uses insightful speculative fiction to mechanically disassemble and then reassemble the power, political and economic structures underpinning our existing world; missing the author showing a greater empathy for the fictional characters that he has placed in that structure – either via the authorial voice or by pausing the world building (and particularly the action sequences) to give us greater access to their inner lives.

The set up of the book postulates a near-future world of near ubiquitous information, social media and nano technology, one already hugely and seemingly irreversibly adversely impacted by climate change but where environmental focus has shifted to the mass species extinction being wrought by nation states and multinational congolmerates in the extractive industry. That focus was initially prompted by strong-arming by China on a tidal wave of national grief following the loss of the last Giant Panda – leading to the formation of the transnational World Commission on Species Extinction (WCSE) and the concept of tradeable extinction credits – giving the right to “wipe a species from the face of the earth” (other than for species certified as “intelligent” by an expert in which case 13 credits are needed).

While the idea of the credits was to gradually reduce supply, leading to extinction being prohibitively expensive, in practice lobbyists “had succeeded in riddling the WCSE framework with so many allowances, indulgences, exceptions and delays that the intended scarcity of extinction credits had never actually come to pass. Extinction credits were plentiful and cheap. You could almost call them democratic” and the prize is under 40,000 Euros. In fact the price is heavily rumoured to punge even further with a change to allow for a species to be considered not extinct even if there are no living examples left if the species data (eg its microbiota, DNA, MRI, detailed descriptions) has first been preserved in a series of secure biobanks.

The book is set almost entirely in Europe, with the UK effectively having sealed itself off (from a now largely disinterested world) into a run-down Hermit Kingdom and where “out of sheer embarrassment” any direct references to the United States are avoided in polite company. As an aside it felt like a rare misstep for me in such a perceptive book to have a world largely denuded of UK and US influence and yet run almost entirely on neo-liberal free-market principles.

The first of the two main characters we meet in the book is the Swiss born Karin Resaint – she works as a consultant to a mining firm, her specialism being to decide if animals threatened by their operations are “intelligent” (so deciding on how many extinction credits are at risk). Karin at the book’s opening is working closely with the titular animal – a feeder fish which as a species have a highly developed collective sense of cold blooded revenge taking on larger fish which threaten or kill its members. Over time we realise that her horrors at the extinction that humanity have wrought mean she is looking for an animal that will take knowing revenge on her (on behalf of her species) and she sees the lumpsucker (and its venom) as a very likely candidate.

The second is an Aussie – Mark Halyard, who works for the mining firm co-ordinating the work of the extinction investigations and animal evaluations. Cynical where Karin is idealistic, he is also (as he seems to enjoy pointing out) logical where allows her emotions and guilt to prevail.

Halyard, something of an obsessive gourmand in a world where climate change has made quality natural foodstuffs vanishingly and prohibitively expensive – he decides to privately short the extinction credit market (assuming it will shortly crash due to his inside knowledge that the biobank amendment will occur) using the money for the thirteen extinction credits that the firm asked him to buy to hedge their small risk if Resaint decides the lumpsucker is intelligent.

When a massive cyber attack wipes out the biobanks and causes the extinction credit price to rocket, and an operational mistake by the mining firm wipes out the colony of lumpsuckers, Resaint and Halyard are reluctantly sent, with different motivations, on a quest to find any remaining colonies elsewhere – a quest which takes them to: a nature reserve in Estonia whose operations were severely compromised by extinction credits not reaching their promised value and are now trying to desparately recover their operations to take advantage of the bounce back; a very odd camp of stranded UK/Hermit Kingdom workers in Finland struck down by a facially altering disease kaptcha which has evolved to defeat facial/animal recognition software; a biotech seastead with a gnat infestation; and then back to the Hermit Kingdom where a notorious Musk-like tech billionaire has effectively bought the South West as his own game reserve, accompanied by a slightly deranged cabinet minister dressed in a mermaid like exosuit.

The writing is often brilliantly pithy as well as very cleverly observed - I loved a throw away line about the environmentalists commonly quoted annual loss of ten thousand species – “you people never stop talking about ten thousand a year, its like being in f…ing Jane Austen” but this was only one of may such observations and the author is particularly strong on evolution and on comparisons between research into and discoveries in animal and artificial intelligence.

He is also very good on human cognitive processes around grieving and guilt – but in a slightly detached observer way – I never felt that I had any genuine access to his characters except potentially at the very end of the book (two closing epilogues are excellent).

And in the systems side of the novel I found that the world building worked a lot better than the actual plot – which for my tastes contained too many side quests (for example a whole other character and story line was introduced simply it seems so the author could write a wearable tech enabled or more accurately disabled sex scene) and too many action scenes with extraneous detail.

Overall though a book that I enjoyed and appreciate one that is slightly different (or at least adjacent to) my normal reading fare; one that kept me largely engaged and entertained while reading; but most of all as one that lead me to greater insight and reflection on our society.