- Dans le berceau du temps d'Adrian Tchaikovski : https://urlr.me/us5zwf

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Book 12: “Where the Axe is Buried” by #RayNayler.

I love this cover so much; it’s like a riso print for a comic. Had to diagram characters, locations, and timelines to follow all of the jumping around. It’s Nayler’s usual fare of capitalism, consciousness, environmental collapse, and AI, but he always manages to write interesting stories about them in different combinations. It’s not all bleak, but what a mess we continue to make for ourselves.

@bookstodon #Bookstodon #Books

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)

#TheTusksOfExtinction #RayNayler #scifi