The Tusks of Extinction

Poaching is terrible, full stop. It’s one of those things you know (or, should know) instinctively is bad, but apparently we still need books and novellas like these to keep on telling people it’s bad, because it’s still happening. Humans keep being humans.

Mammoths have been brought back, but have forgotten how to be mammoths. There’s no other mammoths to teach them how to mammoth, and so their efforts up to this point have ended in failure. Now they’ve taken the mind/thoughts/personality of a human, the late Dr. Damira, expert in elephants, and implanted it into the mind of a mammoth. The idea is that she, with her inborn knowledge of elephants, will be able to guide mammoths accordingly, being similar animals and all. Instead of this intriguing premise, we follow along as a band of poachers targeting mammoths for their incredibly valuable ivory and the inevitable conflict between them and the mammoths.

I thought this was a really good story with flaws. I far and away loved Damira’s viewpoint the best, and would have appreciated a much longer book that took its time with a lot of the ideas and technologies introduced. As a novella you have to go into it expecting that a lot of what’s discussed and posed won’t be answered by the author in a satisfying way, leaving the reader to mull over the words themselves. I do like this aspect, but part of me also wonders if the book would have had more impact if given the space to expand a bit more. The poachers viewpoint was okay, but ultimately not compelling to me, despite the author’s attempts at characterizing and humanizing at least one of them. They’re still poachers at the end of the day, after all.

I also listened to the audiobook of this, and while the person doing Damira’s voice was fantastic, her male counterpart doing the poachers was kind of bad. Flat delivery of lines, delivered in a very low tone of voice that had me cranking my volume up for his portions every time. It doesn’t impact my rating of the actual book at all, but I’m noting it here in case anyone else is looking at the audiobook.

A valuable, worthwhile read, regardless.