The Tusks of Extinction (Ray Nayler)

The Tusks of Extinction
Ray Nayler
MacMillan
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Damira Khismatullina dedicated her life to studying and saving elephants - only to be murdered for her efforts. One hundred years after her death, a recorded version of her consciousness is resurrected by a team of desperate Russian scientists. Though wild elephants have been extinct for decades, cloning efforts have resurrected woolly mammoths, part of a greater effort to restore lost megafauna-shaped habitats and mitigate climate change... but just recreating genetics does not restore the habits, the experience, the many parts of an animal's "culture" that died out. The new creatures may look like mammoths, but don't know how to behave like mammoths, and Damira is the only mind recorded in the Russian archives who might stand a chance of teaching them - if her thoughts were uploaded into the brain of a mammoth matriarch.
Using her experience with elephants and her extensive studies, Damira shows her new herd how to survive and thrive in the Siberian tundra... but when poachers inevitably arrive, and the Russian government begins selling exclusive permits to hunt in the preserve as a way to recoup their massive investment in the project, will she be able to save her new family from going the way of their ancestors?

REVIEW: The relatively recent megafaunal extinction in the wake of the last Ice Age had lasting effects on habitats around the world, effects we are still learning about. Rewilding the Arctic with lost beasts is one proposed method of mitigating climate change, and has apparently already seen some promising efforts in regions where it has been attempted with extant animals like bison - but, of course, until one can resurrect some of the true giants of the lost mammoth steppes, one really can't begin to get the full impact or full benefits. Woolly mammoths in particular are one of the great "near misses" of history; isolated populations were still around when the Egyptian pyramids were being built. This book examines the problems of species revival, not just for the species itself but for the main drivers of the current "sixth extinction" sweeping the globe: humans.
Despite coming from urban Russia, Damira has had a fascination with elephants since childhood, devoting herself to elephant conservation and ultimately giving up her life trying to stop the unstoppable tide of human greed, short-sightedness, and raw thirst for destruction (all enabled by humanity's seemingly infinite capacity for apathy about things they cannot directly experience, the ability to rationalize away the ultimately untenable costs of modern society). Given a second chance at life, she embraces her role as matriarch of the first mammoth herd to walk the earth in thousands of years. Much as she learned about elephants from her life and studies, being a mammoth is an entirely new and fascinating experience, her new brain allowing her to relive and re-examine memories in a way her human brain could never imagine. Many years into her new role, when she finds the telltale traces of a poacher kill, she is not about to stand by idly, using her new mammoth brain and old human mind to tackle the problem in a most decisive way. Meanwhile, Svyatoslav, the son of a bounty hunter joins his father on the first-ever attempt at poaching mammoth ivory, showing just how people get pulled into that world, the desperation and greed and self-delusion that turns them into disposable tools of the greedy, grasping elite. Much as he hates it, he cannot see a way out, until an unexpected opportunity arises. A third storyline follows the married couple Vladimir and Anthony, the first to buy a license to hunt a woolly mammoth. Vladimir, son of expatriate Russians, struggles to feel a connection to the country he only heard about from his embittered family, even as he struggles to reconcile the wealthy man he loved for many years with the dark side that emerges on the hunt. The three storylines inevitably intersect, and that intersection inevitably involves violence and tragedy, while confronting thorny issues of whether or not humans will ever be able to coexist with other species on this world, whether greed is an inevitable and unstoppable force that will ultimately be the doom of everything.
The story came close to losing a mark for repetition and meandering, as well as a few parts that felt forced for convenience (such as a prolonged and remarkably plot-relevant conversation "overheard" via drone by one character, an "as-you-know-Bob" explanation of things that almost had me rolling my eyes at how unnatural it felt to have two people randomly discussing the exact things the listener needed to know about to enable the next part of their tale at the exact right time). It also could not help but be depressing on some level, when the extinction of elephants (and too many other species) looks all too inevitable because there's just plain too much money and power behind the forces enabling butchery and destruction and not enough considering the long-term survival consequences. Beyond that, this is a powerful and unique story that lingers in the memory.

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