The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

The Tusks of Extinction

By Ray Nayler

Tordotcom 2024

Ray Nayler follows up his lavishly imaginative 2022 novel The Mountain in the Sea with The Tusks of Extinction, a stillborn oddity centering around the idea of using genetic manipulation in order to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction. Mammoth DNA was mapped in 2015, and there have been scientific dreams of somehow using that information (and some surrogate Asian elephants) to bring mammoths back into the world from which they were exterminated around 8000 years ago. 

In this new short story from Nayler (despite being $27, the thing is about 70 pages long), set more than a century in the future, these dreams have come true. A Russian scientist named Aslanov is the latest caretaker of a plan that’s successfully re-introduced mammoths to the wintery steppes, long after all other kinds of elephants have been hunted into extinction. The herd is growing in number, but all is not well: the chain of instinct and environment has of course been broken – these resurrected mammoths have been raised in captivity before being let loose on the tundra. 

“What does it take to get a mammoth to be a mammoth, and not just some hair elephant swaying in despair in its refrigerated enclosure? What does it take to get them to know what they are, to understand how to live where they were made to live?” scientists wonder. “And we have the answer, now. It takes someone who knows – or at least can imagine – what being a mammoth was like … It takes an expert.”

Since the few elephants of any kind that still exist in the world were all born and raised in captivity and have been for many decades, it might at first seem impossible to find such an expert, but the Russian elites have been digitizing human personalities for a long time, and one of these digitized personalities belongs to famous slain elephant advocate Damira Khismatullina. 

Aslanov’s plan is as simple as only bad science fiction can make it: with Damira’s agreement, he’ll transfer her mind into the body of a mammoth matriarch, putting her in the perfect position to “teach them how to be mammoths.” Aslanov hopes that the long experience Damira amassed about elephants while she was alive will enable her to teach “wild elephant culture” to mammoths in her new role as their leader, and this in turn will help mammoths to change the world: 

Their return means the return not just of some wooly elephants – it is the return of an entire ecosystem. Their browsing pushes back the forest and encourages the steppe grasses to grow. In the winter, their pushing away of the snow in search of grasses underneath exposes the soil to frigid air, protecting the permafrost. The mammoths are building a more resilient world. They are helping us to undo at least some of the damage man has done.

Complicating this plan is the fact that the long absence of elephants from the world has made ivory immensely valuable; there are poachers stalking these revived mammoths. Readers are introduced to one thuggish group of these poachers, a group including a teenager named Svyatoslav, the story’s only appealing character, who’s tortured by the carnage his comrades (including his father) are inflicting. But these poachers aren’t the only humans on the steppes at the moment, seeking to kill mammoths – as Damira learns to her horror during an uneasy alliance with young Svyatoslav. 

Just as with The Mountain in the Sea (now out from Picador in paperback with a terrific new cover), there’s very good writing in this handful of pages. And considering how bad most commercial science fiction is, it feels almost surreal to be calling for any of it to be longer. But in this case, maybe, say, 200 more pages (but not a penny more in cover price) would have served to flesh out the innumerable problems with the narrative. 

To take just the two biggest of those problems: first, the fact that Damira was an elephant field conservationist would no more make her an expert on elephant culture than your morning’s buttered toast magically gives you the knowledge to rewire your toaster (and it’s wildly untrue in any case; twice even in this short book, Damira leads her herd, including young calves, straight at groups of armed men in a very human-style quest for bloody vengeance). And second, if Damira’s “mind” (a computer program? Something chemical?) is transferred into the body of a mammoth matriarch, what happens to the matriarch’s mind? Since she’s not an “expert,” is she just pithed? There’s more than a whiff of human-centric condescension in both cases.

These and all the other shortcomings of The Tusks of Extinction are disappointing, of course, but then, paying $27 for 70 pages was going to be disappointing anyway. Maybe Nayler could take the DNA of this little thing and teach it how to BE an actual novel? 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News