Spotlight On: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
One of the simplistic popular misunderstandings [the science fiction] bad label has engendered is that “science fiction” authors are trying to predict the future. We fundamentally are not. We are predicating, not predicting, and that one little letter makes all the difference. We are asking detailed “what-if” questions and building the results of those questions out into narrative. Some of these “what-if” questions might have to do with science and/or technology—but others largely do not. One Philip K. Dick story I love, “Roog”, has a simple predication: garbage men are really aliens, and only dogs know this, which is why they bark at them all the time: they are trying to warn us. The story is hilarious, and horrifying. But it isn’t about science and really, neither is anything else Dick wrote. Yet somehow people call Philip K. Dick a science fiction writer, and don’t think twice about it.
― Ray Nayler, Interview with Eliot Pepper
What booksellers are saying about Tusks of Extinction
- Nayler’s newest novella is a one-two punch of beautiful and devastating. In a world where all elephants in the wild have been driven to extinction by poachers, the science world has chosen instead to resurrect the long-dead wooly mammoths–science for the sake of science meets want for the sake of want when this great biological experiment is put up against a revival of ivory poaching culture. Lyrical prose leads the reader through three stories colliding on the fringes of humanity, testing empathy, compassion, and the insurmountable power of human greed.
― Morgan Holub from E. Shaver, bookseller Savannah, Georgia | Buy from Bookmarks
- Absolutely loved this! I was a huge champion of The Mountain in the Sea, we’ve hand sold 100 copies in our small town bookstore. The Tusks of Extinction continues Nayler’s brilliant speculative conversation about humans, tech, nature, language, and more. Unfortunately there is no way the $26.99 price point for a 100 page novella is going to work in our market.
― Josh Niesse from Underground Books Carrollton, Georgia | Buy from Underground Books
- The Tusks of Extinction hurt me, inspired me, and taught me in less than 100 pages. Through the lenses of an elephant-expert turned mammoth matriarch, a boy on a hunt with his father, and a man who can’t rise above his wealth, Nayler’s conservationist novella reaches into depths of human empathy and bares it all for examination. Nothing so short has ever made me cry so much. I pushed this novella onto every ARC reader I knew.
― KIsabel Agajanian from Oxford Exchange Tampa, Florida | Buy from Oxford Exchange
About Ray Nayler
Ray Nayler is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Mountain in the Sea, which won the Locus Award for “Best First Novel,” and was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Los Angeles Times “Ray Bradbury Prize.” Called “one of the up-and-coming masters of SF short fiction” by Locus, Nayler’s stories have been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, and Nightmare, as well as in many “Best Of” anthologies. His stories have won the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, and his novelette “Sarcophagus” was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
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