Rachel Murray

Set in the near future, Ned Beauman’s satirical eco-thriller Venomous Lumpsucker (2022) follows a corrupt mining executive, Mark Halyard, and a biologist employed by a deep-sea mining firm, Karin Resaint, as they embark on an unlikely quest to save a creature from extinction. The creature in question is the fictional venomous lumpsucker (Cyclopterus venenatus), a “bumpy, greyish fish” with a “toadlike face” (18), an “[u]gly little fucker, with a nasty bite” (23). Having declined in numbers due to anthropogenic pollution, the lumpsucker’s last-known breeding grounds in the Baltic Sea are inadvertently destroyed by the mining company early in the text, and its fate is left hanging in the balance. The extinction of this deep-sea fish should trouble no one, for it is a species which, as Halyard states bluntly, “[n]obody cares about” (16). Unlike the last giant panda, Chiu Chiu, whose death twelve years earlier had caused an outpouring of grief “unprecedented in the history of the human race,” (13) this unsightly fish is deemed incapable of eliciting the kind of response reserved for so-called charismatic species, whose cute or awe-inspiring nature has often served to galvanise conservation efforts (Lorimer 2007; Heise 2016). Nobody could pretend to miss a creature, thinks Resaint, as “distant from human apprehension as any species that died out with the dinosaurs” (97). The disappearance of the venomous lumpsucker would surely be “[n]o great loss” (23) given that its existence had barely even been registered.

Blue Extinction in Literature, Culture, and Art examines literary and cultural representations of aquatic biodiversity loss, bringing together critical perspectives from the blue humanities and extinction studies. It demonstrates the affordances, as well as the limitations, of literary and artistic forms in exposing the plight of aquatic organisms, drawing attention to the social, political, and economic structures that are contributing to their destruction. Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate how literature and art can challenge dominant cultural conceptions and lingering misconceptions surrounding aquatic biodiversity loss, offering new ways of relating to species ranging from whales to oysters.