THE TUSKS OF EXTINCTION, by Ray Nayler, is an excellent story set in a bleak and depressingly plausible future. Elephants are gone from the wild, with only captive herds remaining: the battle between poachers and rangers began to target the rangers directly, and ultimately the poachers won. Now a mammoth herd has been recreated and placed in a vast Siberian reserve.

Damira is a now-dead Russian woman who was an anti-poaching activist, and ultimately was murdered. But her consciousness was uploaded years before her death, and now has been placed in the matriarch of the mammoth herd to keep them safe. When poachers get in and kill two of the males, Damira sees red. And she has a human's ability to understand what's happening, and to plan, and to seek revenge.

I'm torn on this one, ... it's a great story, showing empathy for Damira the human, Damira the mammoth, Svyatoslav the poacher, and Vladimir who's more of an observer -- but it left me feeling down for several days. I think the sentence that killed me was where the author says that not even the tuskless elephants were safe, as attention shifted from elephant ivory to skin or body parts instead, and so the hunting continued into extinction. A tough book to read, but I think it'll stay with me for a while.

(2/6)

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Book 8: “The Tusks of Extinction” by #RayNayler.

“The Mountain in the Sea” was my favorite novel of 2023, so I jumped on this. A novella this time—of course I wanted more. Still, Nayler is able to tell a compelling story involving animals, technology, and humanity’s immense capacity for destruction and cruelty. For all the book’s brevity, or maybe because of it, the betrayals are deeper between these characters. The ending is not without hope though.

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