Venomous Lumpsucker

This is how it will happen, writes Beauman (The Teleportation Accident). His science mostly-fiction parable and fifth novel draws an uninterrupted line of descent between today’s economic solutions to environmental problems (the recycling industry, cap-and-trade polluting) and the day-after-tomorrow’s market in Extinction Credits, wherein countries and companies trade permission to keep eliminating species by the thousands. Listeners follow Karin Resaint, a corporate assessor of species’ intelligence preparing to recertify the venomous lumpsucker’s exemption from obliteration for personal reasons, and Mark Halyard, fellow industry insider, whose Credit embezzlement might have gone unnoticed if a computer error hadn’t likely already wiped out the lumpsucker’s last known population. John Hasting narrates these contrasted characters with nimbly varying effect and accent, encompassing Swiss Resaint’s surface pragmatism and hidden despair, Australian Halyard’s voluble defensiveness and much more deeply hidden grief, and a distinctly voiced international cast of allies and enemies met around the Baltic as they pursue any hint of a living lumpsucker. The adventure they encounter and fragile hope they find, packaged with British humor as wryly absurd as the fish’s name, keeps listeners absolutely hooked.