Venomous Lumpsucker

Review

Quite fun! I grabbed this in a book swap with my Small Press Fiction book club.

Much of what makes speculative fiction interesting is that it is speculating on our future. Good spec fic finds roots in our contemporary world and draws them out through time, to some logical conclusion. ‘Logical’ here does not mean ‘exact’ or ‘unexaggerated’ or even especially ‘likely.’ It means, the reader can suspend disbelief such that they can imagine the book happening, and they can see parallels in the current world. When those parallels are foundational to the story, and when the story is some version of fun (gallivanting, interesting, riveting, perplexing, even sometimes the right dose of depressing), the writer has produced something worth reading and worth enjoying, as here Beauman has done.

A concern I often level at contemporary specfic is that its critique is often tweetshaped (or maybe ‘skeetshaped’ on BlueSky). I used to be in a book club that peppered me with these. I’d take up the pencil and circle one or two sentences on a page where the author had left their point, and everything around it was pretty bland and boring. The rest of the text served only as an excuse to make the reader notice those few (often “funny”) sentences. Sometimes this is because it is genuinely hard to write good fiction (I certainly struggle to do it, and have never been brave enough to publish any). Sometimes it’s because the writer forgets that critique needs to be more than 180 characters in a 300-page book (or, god forbit, an editor has not broken the writer’s heart sufficiently to make clear that the story and the critique are not connected).

I came to this book a little concerned that would be the case. The cover has a blurb from the Chicago Review of Books, “Screamingly, bleakly funny . . . A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a gut-punching satire of the failure of the carbon offset project.” That’s a pretty tall order, and I squirmed a bit at the idea of a “gut-punching satire,” mortified that all I would find is a few elbow-throw jokes with CARBON CREDITS and NET ZERO EMISSIONS in great big bold text. What a joy to find my concerns unjustified! Beauman creates a legitimate world, with a new idea that so clearly satirizes those credits, but which is also interesting unto itself, with characters that have more-or-less distinct voices and interests and roles in this world.

I took no notes or highlights while reading, and that is probably a good thing. I started this as a weekend read while through the working week I worked on a long non-fiction title (Caro’s Master of the Senate) I’ve had going for several years. To the book’s credit, I felt the pull back towards it any time I was in a breathless paragraph from Caro’s typewriter.

Probably my only complaint, and it is a minor one, is that there are a few spots of dead weight. The last section or two of Chapter Fifteen features Resaint leave our regular characters to go relax in a cabin with another character we’d met very briefly a bit before. It gets a little messy, because while we’re with these two on some random island for birding, we get a quasi-flashback of Resaint speaking with Halyard. Beauman does this a lot, mid-scene, a character will recall a conversation they’ve had previously, flashback style. Most of the time this works fine, but here it feels odd and confusing. I think it’s possible he didn’t know where to put this conversation, and I think he probably wanted Resaint to have a break, and so threw these two wants together. To cap it, we have what I find to be an annoying sex scene that I could’ve done without, and anyone that knows me would be surprised to read me write that. But, again, this scene takes up perhaps 10 pages in a 337-page novel.

I liked it!