The Tusks of Extinction

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Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction (2024) is a conceptually dense novella that confronts the vanity of the Anthropocene through the lens of de-extinction. The narrative centers Dr. Damira Shakhbazova, a preeminent mammoth expert and digital ghost. In her past life, Damira was a brilliant behavioral ecologist who was brutally murdered by poachers while trying to protect elephant herds. In the narrative’s present, her digitized consciousness—salvaged from a cold-storage backup—is uploaded into the mind of a cloned mammoth matriarch. Resurrected by the shadowy, oligarchic “Moscow Corporation,” this mammoth is meant to anchor a newly-bred herd in the Siberian “Pleistocene Park.” Conflict arises because the cloned mammoths, lacking generational memory and social structures, are dying of behavioral failure; they do not know how to be mammoths. Damira’s human mind must synthesize with the ancient, dormant instincts of the mammoth body to teach the herd how to survive.

Nayler articulates the novella by weaving Damira’s internal, posthuman experience alongside two parallel plotlines. The first follows a team of highly weaponised eco-defense mercenaries hired by the corporation to protect the multi-billion-dollar herd from heavily-armed poaching syndicates. The second follows a wealthy, elite modern hunter who has purchased the ultimate luxury experience: the legal right to hunt and kill one of these resurrected giants. Instead of yielding to the technophilic spectacle typical of modern clone-and-capture narratives, Nayler introduces a stark, suspenseful eco-thriller that quickly shifts away from the mechanics of genetic engineering to examine the structural violence of ecotourism and late-stage capitalism. The narrative converges in an inevitable, bloody confrontation where human greed clashes directly with the ancient, newly-awakened instincts of the herd, resulting in a bleak interrogation of human supremacy.

Within the broader trajectory of science fiction, The Tusks of Extinction actively converses with and subverts the long-standing “resurrection” lineage depicted in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990). While Crichton’s foundational text explores the chaotic collapse of human systems under the weight of genetic pride and chaos theory, Nayler alters this trope by shifting the focus from the scientific how to the socio-ecological why. The novella draws deeply upon the conventions of climate fiction and contemporary posthumanism, trading the typical pulp-adventure thrills of rampaging monsters for a somber, philosophical exploration of digital reincarnation, interspecies trauma, and synthetic ecology.

Furthermore, by choosing the mammoth, a creature deeply tied to actual, contemporary scientific efforts regarding Siberian permafrost restoration, Nayler grounds his speculative world in immediate, real-world ecological debates. He draws on the traditions of classic eco-speculative fiction, such as the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K. Le Guin, where the natural world is not merely a passive backdrop for human drama but an active, agentic protagonist. Nayler employs the genre’s historic capacity for cognitive alienation to mirror our current climate anxieties, playing with the generic boundaries between the hard sci-fi cyberpunk matrix (the digitised mind) and the gritty, visceral reality of climate-altered landscapes.

From a scholarly and formal perspective, the novella offers immense critical potential for science fiction studies. Its formal structure, juxtaposing the corporate-funded resurrection of megafauna against the continuous, low-intensity warfare of modern poaching, powerfully complicates the historical science fiction trope of the “technological fix”. Nayler suggests that merely resurrecting a biology does not resurrect an ecology, nor does it dissolve the capitalist frameworks that caused the extinction in the first place. Thus, the text introduces a profound, dialectical tension between the physical flesh of the mammoth and the digitised ghost of the human mind inside it. This raises crucial posthumanist questions regarding where human agency ends and animal subjectivity begins, directly contributing to the intellectual and philosophical concerns of contemporary science fiction.

Compared to contemporary science fiction texts that favour lengthy space operas or techno-optimistic solarpunk, Nayler’s approach stands out for its concise, razor-sharp focus on the ethics of the Anthropocene. The prose is stripped of excess, functioning like a clinical yet deeply poetic case study in extinction economics.

For researchers and educators in the English Studies domain, The Tusks of Extinction possesses remarkable pedagogical utility. It serves as an ideal anchor for undergraduate or graduate modules focusing on the Environmental Humanities, Critical Animal Studies, or contemporary speculative fiction. The novella can be productively paired with classic extinction literature or contemporary eco-theory, such as Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble or Ursula K. Heise’s Imagining Extinction, to ground its narrative in biopolitical theory. It also pairs brilliantly alongside Crichton’s Jurassic Park for a comparative study on how the Science Fiction genre’s attitude toward genetic engineering has evolved over three decades. An effective classroom exercise would involve a discourse analysis of the corporate rhetoric utilised by the novella’s “Moscow Corporation” versus the real-world promotional material of actual de-extinction startups (such as Colossal Biosciences). Students can map out how speculative literature exposes the hidden neocolonial and neoliberal motivations embedded within contemporary science, analysing how Nayler seizes form to critique the commodification of the non-human world. Ultimately, the text offers a compact yet theoretically rich intervention that challenges students to rethink the boundaries of conservation, memory, and species justice.

Adrián Pla Ángel holds a Cum Laude PhD with international distinction in Applied Languages, Literature, and Translation from Universitat Jaume I, where he serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies. Besides, he is also lecturer of the Education department at the European University of Valencia. As a member of the IULMA research institute and the SPARK research group, his research focuses on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and the multimodal analysis of digital and textual genres. His extensive university teaching experience includes courses in complex text production, advanced registers, and technical English, backed by international research stays in Germany and the Czech Republic. He is also actively involved in educational innovation and funded research projects.