Cover 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.
Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior, was brutally murdered trying to defend the world’s last elephants from the brutal ivory trade. Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.
As the herd’s new matriarch, can Damira help fend off poachers long enough for the species to take hold? Or will her own ghosts, and Moscow’s real reason for bringing the mammoth back, doom them to a new extinction?
My thoughts
The Tusks of Extinction is a short novel—really a novella—set at least a century in the future, after humankind has driven wild elephants to extinction. To rectify this tragedy, scientists clone mammoths and release them in a preserve in Siberia, hoping the remoteness of the location will protect them from humans. The problem is that cloned mammoths lack the learned behavior needed to survive in the wild, as there are no wild mammoths or elephants to teach them. However, humanity has also developed the ability to copy and store human consciousness, so in a desperate move, the mind of one of the last humans to study elephants in the wild, Damira Khismatullina, is implanted in a mammoth matriarch so she can teach the animals how to survive on their own. When poachers invade the mammoth sanctuary, Damira’s rage leads her to impart some deadly lessons.
Despite being marketed as a thriller, The Tusks of Extinction is more of a character study and a reflection on modern-day conservation efforts. Besides Damira, readers follow a young poacher with conflicted feelings about hunting the mammoths, as well as the husband of a Russian billionaire who has paid a small fortune to fund the conservation effort but in return is allowed to cull a bull mammoth. They are all compelling characters and the book is well-written, but their stories feel truncated. One of my common complaints for many books that I review on this blog is they are too long for the stories they tell—that they are padded with content that expands the page count but doesn’t move the plot forward. Here I feel the opposite is true. At a little over 100 pages, The Tusks of Extinction is simply too short. For instance, readers spend relatively little time with Damira, and most of that is flashbacks of her human life rather her life among the mammoths. The short length also results in characters sometimes monologuing their motivations and histories rather than showing them through story. And I would have liked to know a little more about this fictional future world, or at least the conservation effort that brought back the mammoths, but readers are only given snippets of worldbuilding.
Despite my frustration about the book’s length, I enjoyed The Tusks of Extinction. As stated, the characters are compelling, with the author avoiding the lazy trope of bad guys vs. good guys. Take the poachers, who are not good people but also not evil, just desperate people driven to desperate acts to survive in the broken system they live in. The author’s writing is fluid and occasionally haunting. And, reflecting my own bias, I enjoy stories that have something to say about current environmental issues. I wish the book was longer but it is worth a read.
Trivia
- Author Ray Naylor has published one other work of fiction, the critically acclaimed science fiction novel The Mountain in the Sea. His website is RayNaylor.net.
- Mammoth cloning is having a bit of a moment in literature. At the time I write this, The Tusks of Extinction is the third mainstream novel about cloning mammoths published in recent months, following The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel and preceding Extinction by Douglas Preston. The sudden popularity of the subject is likely the result of it receiving a considerable amount of press attention in recent years.
Reviews
Prehistoric Pulp 