#tusks of extinction

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #5 – The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

I read Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea last year and, despite thinking it was ultimately kind of a noble failure, liked it more than enough to give his new novella a try. It didn’t hurt that the premise as described in the marketing copy sounded incredible. I can’t quite say it was worth it, but that’s really only because this novella barely cost less than the 500-page doorstopper I picked up at the same time and I need to consider economies here – it absolutely lived up to the promise of its premise.

The book is set a century and change into the future, when a de-extinction initiative has gotten funding from the Russian government to resurrect the Siberian mammoth – or, at least, splice together a chimera that’s close-enough and birth it from african elephant surrogate mothers – to begin the process of restoring the prehistoric taiga as a carbon sink. The problem: there’s no one on earth left who knows how wild mammoth are supposed to, like, live- the only surviving elephants have been living in captivity for generations. Plop the ressurectees in the wilderness and they’ll just be very confused and anxious until they starve. The solution: the technology to capture a perfect image of a human mind is quite old, and due to winning some prestigious international award our protagonist – an obsessive partisan of elephant conservation – was basically forced to have her mind copied and put in storage a few months before she was killed by poachers.

So the solution of who will raise and socialize these newly created mammoths is ‘the 100-year-old ghost of an elephant expert, after having her consciousness reincarnated in a mammoth’s body to lead the first herd as the most mature matriarch’. It works better than you’d expect, really, but as it turns out she has some rather strong opinions about poachers, and isn’t necessarily very understanding when the solution found to keep the project funded involves letting some oligarch spend a small country’s GDP on the chance to shoot a bull and take some trophies.

So this is a novella, and a fairly short one – it’s densely packed with ideas but the length and the constraints of narrative mean that they’re more evoked or presented than carefully considered. This mostly jumps out at me with how the book approaches wildlife conservation – a theme that was also one of the overriding concerns of Mountain where it was considered at much greater length. I actually think the shorter length might have done Nayler a service here, if only because it let him focus things on one specific episode and finish things with a more equivocal and ambiguous ending than the saccharine deux ex machina he felt compelled to resort to in Mountain.

The protection of wildlife is pretty clearly something he’s deeply invested in – even if he didn’t outright say so in the acknowledgements, it just about sings out from the pages of both books. Specifically, he’s pretty despairing about it – both books to a great extent turn around how you convince the world at large to allow these animals to live undisturbed when all the economic incentives point the other way, a question he seems quite acutely aware he lacks a good answer to.

Like everyone else whose parents had Jurassic Park on VHS growing up, I’ve always found the science of de-extinction intensely fascinating – especially as it becomes more and more plausible every day. This book wouldn’t have drawn my eye to nearly the degree it did if I don’t remember the exact feature article I’d bet real money inspired it about a group of scientists trying to do, well, exactly the same thing as the de-extinctionists do in the book (digital resurrection aside). The book actually examines the project with an eye to practicalities and logistics – and moreover, portrays it as at base a fundamentally heroic, noble undertaking as opposed to yet another morality tale about scientific hubris. So even disregarding everything else it had pretty much already won me over just with that.

The book’s portrayal of the future and technology more generally is broader and less carefully considered, but it still rang truer than the vast majority of sci fi does – which is, I suppose, another way of saying that it’s a weathered and weather-beaten world with new and better toys, but one still very fundamentally recognizable as our own, without any great revolutions or apocalyptic ruptures in the interim. Mosquito's got CRISPR’d into nonexistence and elephants were poached into extinction outside of captivity, children play with cybernetically controlled drones and the president of the Russian Federation may or may not be a digital ghost incarnated into a series of purpose-grown clones, but for all that it’s still the same shitty old earth. It’s rather charming, really.

[libraryspectre]

I've read some weird books in my time. However.

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[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Another sketch brought to you by #paleostream!

Choerolophodon, a quite small and weird proboscidean next to a Hipparion.

[aplpaca]

fun fact that bc of one of their claws being Obnoxiously Fucking Huge, male fiddler crabs literally can't eat with it. Which means they spend like twice as much time eating as females, since females can shovel food into their mouth with both claws but males can only do it with one

This relates to the concept of "honest/costly signaling" in ecology, which contains the idea that traits that attract mates can be an accurate display of an individual's fitness/capability due to said trait actually having disadvantages (ex. long attractive tails in some birds making moving more difficult, large claws making it harder to eat, being brightly colored making you more visible to predators, etc). The idea being that if certain attractive traits are actually disadvantageous, then an organism thriving and being overall healthy despite said traits is evidence that said organism is Good At Surviving, and therefore a good potential mate.

So while bigger claws do have the benefit of giving a male fiddler crab an edge in fights with other males, which play a big role in female mate choice, a male being healthy while having his bigass claw in the first place also serves as indirect proof that he's good at successfully obtaining enough food to survive

but like. look at this dude. he can't eat with that thing. he's got one functional food shovel bc the women think him having a one-purpose bigass muscle arm is Good Baby Material. and they're not even technically wrong

[tyranitarsbooks]

[michael-rosskothen]

Homo Habilis and Mammoths

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Tusks of Extinction

By Ray Nayler.

Design by Spencer Fuller.

[dude1818]

Read two short books on a flight today, then starting the next October Daye one

Wild Spaces by S. L. Coney

I'm not sure why this was on my reading list. I'm guessing I saw it on a Tor email and thought "eldritch psychological thriller." It was not that. It's about a 11 year old boy whose mom's abusive dad shows up out of the blue to stay with them, and the family falls apart over the course of months. Then his grandfather turns into a jellyfish monster and kills his parents and dog

Awful experience. Why would you want to read a book where everyone's just miserable the whole time and nothing happens

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

This one was cooler. It's about an elephant conservation who gets killed by poachers. In the future, they restore her from a mind upload into the body of a cloned wooly mammoth to lead the new herd, since she's the last mind on Earth who knows what elephants and mammoths were like in the wild

Meanwhile, there's a group of poachers who get into the mammoth sanctuary and kill a couple, so she leads her herd to avenge them. The twist, kind of, is that the lead conservationist at the sanctuary is also selling tickets to hunt mammoths to fund the conservation efforts. This leads to a confrontation between the mammoth!conservationist and the human one, who knows he's fucked up

This one was a pretty heavy-handed commentary on the modern-day exploitation of the natural world for resources, and is kind of a downer. However, the characters and action in the book are compelling enough to carry it in my opinion

[nevinslibrary]

Weird & Wonderful Wednesday

Oh… okay, Wooly Mammoths and… uploading a dead scientist’s consciousness into the leader of the mammoth herd? Basically, Dr. Damira Khismatullina was (I keep wanting to type is… oops…) an expert on elephant behaviour, and so, her consciousness has been digitized and put into the mind of the matriarch of the mammoth herd so that she can teach the mammoths to be mammoths. Of course, it’s not that easy or straightforward. Why did Moscow really bring back the mammoth, not to mention, there are poachers for these grand animals too.

It was a short story, but, whew, it packed a lot into itself for sure. The characters were great, and, it was definitely an eco-thriller. And, I don’t know if this was entirely the point or not, but, through the fact that the mammoths have been brought back in physical form, but don’t seem to have been fully brought back in mental form, it sort of sideways seemed to approach the question of mind vs. body just a little.

You may like this book If you Liked: The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen, Extinction by Douglas J. Preston, or The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

[literary-illuminati]

Possibly literally the first time I've ever been happy to have opened those 'next month's hot releases' emails Goodreads sends.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Tusks of Extinction | Author: Ray Nayler | Publisher: Tor (2024)

[myhikari21things]

Read of The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (2023) (98pgs)

[incrediblebeasties]

Dogged by climate change and human hunters, a mammoth’s life is written in her tusks

Elma spent most of her time in two regions about 1000 kilometers apart, one in eastern Alaska, the other in western Yukon. Both are rich in signs of human presence. Artifacts at Elma’s final resting place, Swan Point, date back 14,000 years. The site “is largely regarded as the earliest unequivocal evidence for human occupation in Beringia,” the now partly submerged land between Alaska and Siberia.

The fact that Kik and Elma largely traveled the same trails, despite being separated by 4000 years, suggests consistent, predictable movement patterns, the authors say. As with modern game animals such as elk, that may have allowed humans to plan hunting camps around their presence. Swan Point contains the same types of small, razorlike projectile blades known to have felled Siberian mammoths some 30,000 years earlier.

DNA from Elma’s tusks revealed she was closely related to previously excavated juvenile and infant mammoths at Swan Point.

At the very least, the juvenile and neonate were probably hunted by humans.

Elma herself might have been felled by humans: Isotopes in the outermost layers of her tusks suggest she was healthy and well-nourished when she died.

[jonathanpongratz]

New Book Release: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

    Blurb: When you bring back a long-extinct species, there’s more to success than the DNA. Moscow has resurrected the mammoth, but someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out, again. The late Dr. Damira Khismatullina, the world’s foremost expert in elephant behavior, is called in to help. While she was murdered a year ago, her digitized consciousness is uploaded…

[tra1nchi]

Can I request elf bottom reader x male human/orc? With size difference and a bit of feminization, maybe?

hope you're having a good day <3

<3333 smooches ur forehead,,MINORS DNI!! Bttm male reader,,orc character,, Size diff,,Feminization,,manipulation,,bj,, hole as pussy

You were isolated ever since you were a young boy,,being an elven prince was such difficult duty due to the decline of the species,,humans,orcs and even faes have succeeded where your kind has failed :(

Elves were designed to be pretty creatures,,no matter gender,, it was an evolution strain to better attract mates to save Elves from extinction but it seemed to work a little too well sometimes!!

Your mother,,the queen was kidnapped by a group of bandits during the night so when you set out to find her,,you were picked up by a scraggly group of adventures!!

They treated you kindly,,especially one member,,Stalfen,,He was an orc and was sometimes difficult to understand due to not being able to understand English properly,,

No matter how many times you would tell him,,he would not accept that you weren't a girl!! "Soft cheeks..no equal boy.." The large orc mutters shaking his head as he cooks a meal for the group,,the other members seemed amused from his innocent confusion!!

You noticed how touchy he was with you,,but you put it down to some orc tradition you didn't understand,,even though he didn't touch the other party members in that weird way,,

"Girly moans.." He grumbles out as he glances up from your spurting cock,,letting it fall from his mouth as you cum over his large chest,,you whimpered looking down at him,,your hands clapping over your mouth to not wake the rest of your party in other tents!!

Stalfens hands were the wizened your entire head as he gripped you,,flipping you on your tummy as his massive cock rested against your back!! "Princess Pussy.." You could hear him mumbling to himself as he uses his other hand to spread your ass,,prodding the head of his cock against your hole!!

You shook your head,,gasping out at the pure size of his prick!! A clear bugle in your tummy was visible as he thrusted in and out of your smaller body!! His massive hand coming to cover your face as his tusks dig into your skin,,claiming you as his cute compliant little mate!!

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

hullo i wanted to request a sabertooth salmon mention ,, they’re extinct but theyre criminally underrated and i dont think people realize how big they were (dammit ark) . love your blog So very much and thankyou : )

Ooh! Of course! :D

Daily fish fact #639

Sabertooth salmon!

These massive fish were no joke, as they could grow to be over two meters in length (6'7''~)! They had large sideways-facing tusks which were most likely used for defending their territory. Despite their formidable tusks, the sabertooth salmon are speculated to be planktivores, as their gill rakers were long and numerous!