Ray Nayler’s debut novel, The Mountain within the Sea (2022), informed an inverted model of a primary contact story. As an alternative of clever aliens from one other world, human beings encounter proof of one other tool- and language-using species right here on Earth: quite a lot of octopus. Nayler’s future was one through which nonhuman intelligence abounded, within the type of various ranges of AI, and through which folks had so totally dismissed and disrespected the pure world they practically neglected the daybreak of a newly superior species proper beneath the waves.
In Nayler’s equally themed follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction, poachers have worn out Earth’s wild elephants. Advances in cloning know-how permit scientists to convey again the wooly mammoth. However the mammoths do not know be mammoths. So the scientists that cloned the large creatures additionally resurrect a digital copy of a lifeless scientist and activist who, earlier than her demise, studied elephants within the wild.
As in Mountain, Tusks treats intelligence and consciousness as spectrums somewhat than as easy binaries, portraying a planet on which people usually are not so particular, and animals, extinct and reborn, function ethical rivals. In a world the place new types of intelligence appear to be showing on daily basis, his books elevate important questions on what qualities give a being price.
This text initially appeared in print below the headline “The Tusks of Extinction.”