I just had the pleasure of reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and Tusks of Extinction. Both were extremely interesting and accessible examples of cli-fi/sci-fi and I’m excited for more long-form work from Nayler, who is uniquely able to deliver narratives that engage nonhuman characters and issues of interspecies communication and embodiment as affective issues, but without and triteness or saccharine prose.

I started with Tusks of Extinction, a super quick read. While it deals with climate catastrophe, especially mass extinction, it uses this background to shed light on the anguish, powerlessness, grief, and ultimately, anger that many of us feel as our planet smolders and catches fire. On one hand, the story is wracked with grief, with the melancholy and fearful genetically resurrected mammoths via the hybrid consciousness of Damira. Damira herself struggles with her identity, and through this struggle, she bridges the narrative gap between a human narrating voice and the embodied presence of the megafauna. On the other hand, Nayler refuses to wallow in melancholy or the powerlessness of one actor in the midst of an economy that sees value in ivory only when it’s divorced from the head that birthed it. Plenty of the story are scenes of righteous anger, as Damira and co. stomp poachers into a fine paste on the taiga. A longer analysis of the novella could include some thoughts on embodied narration via Spinoza, that is, the Spinoza of the first books of the Ethics, refuting the separation of mind and body on the grounds that they are coextensive, and demonstrating how Nayler courts this sensibility in Damira, who begins her life as a human, becomes a disembodied digital copy of her consciousness which survives her organic body by two centuries, and is finally uploaded into the body of a genetically engineered mammoth. We get a taste of her new modes of sensation and perception, but there is still enough opacity to rub against the flattening narrative short-circuit of anthropomorphization. I’m also thinking, of course, of the economics of resurrecting creatures as depicted in Nayler’s future nature preserve: how does this work with work like that of Borg and Policano, or Melinda Cooper? Is this a narrative that threatens the sacred status of the nonprofit, which are typically bulletproof, at least in terms of public opinion, when it comes to negative publicity regarding the flow of money, IP, and the autonomy of those functioning within their various zones of influence?

The corporate stuff is easier, so the inroad to The Mountain in the Sea is at least more familiar. DIANIMA, a rich portmanteau, purchases some islands to research a smart octopus. We add to this narrative formula a variety of sovereign entities, including religious foundations that stretch across national borders, autonomous trade zones, and traditional national/political organizations. While our main character is human, she cohabitates with a humanoid robot and a cybernetically enhanced security officer, who commands a fleet of attack drones from a tank of fluid kilometers away from the battle. Oh, and there are octopi that use symbolic language. The novel provides an interesting puzzle (unsolveable until we are given enough info at the same time as milestones in the mystery are revealed, but there is the temptation to outthink the characters) in the nature of octopod cultural production under late-stage capitalism, environmental devastation, and the communicative lacunae that both animal and human confront in the relationship of scientist and subject.