The Tusks of Extinction
Ray Nayler
The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler is a finalist for the 2025 Best Novella Hugo Award. It's good, but I think Nayler made the mistake of trying to cram a novel's worth of story into a novella. As the publisher's blurb tells us, the central character is an elephant behavior expert, Damira Khismatullina, who takes the place of a mammoth.
The future fiction aspects of the story are three. (1) Elephants get hunted to extinction in the wild by poachers. (This hasn't quite happened yet, but it's a very near prospect, as Nayler knows well from his real life occupation as as environment, science, technology, and health officer at the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.) (2) Genetic mammoths are brought back from extinction from the DNA of frozen mammoths and elephants. Scientists are working on this kind of thing now. It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but it is realistic. (3) A person's mental state can be backed up in digital form and uploaded into a receptive brain. This sort of thing, although it is a common staple of science fiction, is utterly speculative. No neuroscientist on Earth has any clear idea of how or whether it could be accomplished, aside from the indisputable fact that it's a very, very hard problem, if it can be done at all. But up- and downloading human minds is commonplace in science fiction, so we can pretend we believe it.
To simplify quite a lot, mammoths are brought back from extinction, and Damira's saved mind is uploaded into one of them to become the matriarch of a group of mammoths and to teach them how to be mammoths and survive. Mammoths, like elephants, are targeted for their ivory.
If it were that simple, Tusks of Extinction would be a great novella. But it's not. For instance, there are frequent flashbacks. These are explained as inherent to mammoth neuroobiology. Through them we get to know many of Damira's family and past colleagues. There are also poachers and game officer who fight them.
I still liked it quite a lot. But in the end, I have to say that I admired it more than I enjoyed it.
This was the last 2025 novella finalist I read. Here, then, are my ratings for the six.
★★★★☆ The Brides of High Hill, by Nghi Vo
★★★★☆ The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
★★★★★ Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
★★☆☆☆ The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
★★★★☆ The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
★★★★☆ What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
With the exception of The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, I rated them all high. That's not surprising -- after all, they are Hugo finalists. For me, Navigational Entanglements was the clear winner. I could however, defend any of these novellas as worthy of a win. (Even The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, which possibly just pushed all the wrong buttons for me.) It was a good year for novellas, I will vote for de Bodard, without, honestly, a lot of hope that she'll win.