For all its environmental gloom, Venomous Lumpsucker happens to be a particularly funny novel about climate change, putting it in rare company with the likes of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2009), and Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013). In a fatalistic field, Beauman’s contribution to climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, offers distinct lines of enquiry concerning the Anthropocene, ‘a hellish time to be alive’.

The novel is set in the near future, a time when ecological collapse is well underway and publicly accepted to the point of being merely subsumed into the inexorable march of algorithm-driven, capitalist progress. But ‘even the boldest advances in technology [cannot] keep up with the rate of collapse’. Central to this is the rampant marketisation of extinction: the annihilation of whole species reduced to datapoints in biobanks (archives of DNA samples that are soon-to-be sabotaged), and a credit system not unlike that of the ways governments account for carbon emissions today. A key species amid the global slaughter is the fictional eponymous fish, soon to be certified as intelligent by Swiss biologist Karin Resaint and therefore granted an elevated status, much to the chagrin of mining executive/extinction mogul Mark Halyard, who, in a grave misstep, has potentially wiped out the very last one. In a classic set-up, Resaint and Halyard are brought together by their shared interest in the fish’s survival.

The ensuing hunt is hilarious and devastating in equal portions, taking the unlikely partnership across Europe, mainly the Baltic, as well as ‘The Hermit Kingdom’, a post-Brexit Britain taken to the extreme, closed off and isolated. No one even talks about the United States anymore, for fear of embarrassment. And while the prose crackles with intelligence throughout, the interactions and exchanges between Resaint and Halyard provide a discursive depth that other ecological thrillers often lack:

‘You don’t believe that anything can have value of its own beyond what function is serves for human beings?’ … Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a [lush] planet in some remote galaxy … ‘[I]f an asteroid smashed into this planet … nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?’

‘But the universe is bloody huge – stuff like that must happen every minute … Honestly it sounds to me like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles.’

The future Beauman conjures is one of the most fully realised in climate fiction, adorned with intricate detail and plotting. The economic and social systems on which this future is predicated are reminiscent of the dense systems of Kim Stanley Robinson’s worlds, yet never seem to dull the proceedings. Beauman has a rare knack for levity around heavy subject matter: ‘Everyone agreed that to lose an intelligent species was the gravest loss of all, and so, although such extinctions could not be prohibited outright – that would not be a nimble free market solution – they should be very sternly disincentivised.’ Deeper into the novel it becomes clear that the author’s prefatory note, facetious as it might be, speaks also to creative self-assuredness. On our current trajectory it is difficult to imagine a future vastly different from that of Venomous Lumpsucker, marred as it is with ‘mutant COVID-24’ and the extractive forces of algorithmic, technological capitalism. There is a clear sense that the novel’s pre-dystopian past is precisely our present. Beauman’s is therefore more a work of extrapolative fiction than of speculative fiction, detailing ‘how things will actually unfold’.

Well, up to a certain point.

The credibility of his world established, Beauman sets about having fun, taking the latter half of the narrative to increasingly complex and mysterious heights, knitting together Resaint and Halyard’s fish hunt, the biobank sabotage, and various interconnected subplots, concluding in a ridiculous sequence in Cornwall. Yet this playfulness is never at the expense of profundity, the two complementing one another in a dialectic that authors of climate fiction often struggle to balance:

[Halyard] heard that these people you met inside [prison] were not fondly disposed towards environmental crimes, not the guards and not the other prisoners either. It was never good to be the culpable human face of an ongoing mega-tragedy affecting every living being.

This might well polarise readers; after all, the collapse of the biosphere is no laughing matter. Nor is it for Beauman, whose take on human destruction never strays into the over-simplistic. In contrast to the more earnest sentiments of contemporary environmental writing, Beauman articulates how comedically absurd the details of human exploits are against the backdrop of a grander, planetary tragedy. Venomous Lumpsucker is not only Beauman’s strongest work to date, but also one of the most enjoyable novels about extinction.