‘The Truth Was, Most Biodiversity Was Redundant’: Caring About Mass Extinction in Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker

This essay reads Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker as exploring the gap that exists between caring about mass species extinction and taking meaningful action to prevent it. The novel, at first, undermines the conventional reasons for caring; however, one of its protagonists is then revealed as having become willing to die for the issue. Equally, the reason for this change proves strangely hard to locate. This essay argues that the real reason for caring about species extinction in Venomous Lumpsucker is connected to a transcendence of the self that aligns the novel with both science fiction and spiritual traditions; however, this reason is so unappealing that it can manifest in the text only in disguised and tortuous forms. Venomous Lumpsucker enables new insights into the connection between spirituality and species extinction in the current moment, and suggests further questions that might be explored in the light of this.