Ray Nayler

When you bring back a long-extinct species, there’s more to success than the DNA.

Moscow has resurrected the mammoth, but someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out, again.

The late Dr. Damira Khismatullina, the world’s foremost expert in elephant behavior, is called in to help. While she was murdered a year ago, her digitized consciousness is uploaded into the brain of a mammoth. 

Can she help the magnificent creatures fend off poachers long enough for their species to take hold?

And will she ever discover the real reason they were brought back?

A tense eco-thriller from a new master of the genre.

The Tusks of Extinction

Lindsay

Hunting didn’t seem like a skill: you armed yourself, you went out into the woods, and you waited. And then you killed something that did not have any of the tools you had.

The waiting was simple enough— wind direction, blinds, concealment. You could learn it in a season. The real advantage was the gun, and knowing how to use a gun was also nothing to be proud of. Any idiot could use one. Most of the people who used them were idiots.

She tossed half the coffee in the trash, feeling guilty for the waste. But pouring it into her body was just as much of a waste.

I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.

I think there are people who come from somewhere, like me. And there are people who come from nowhere, like you. And there is power in both.

Power was the ability to destroy without needing to. To do it not out of necessity, but as an act of pure excess. To do something to someone else simply because you could. And this was perhaps the greatest power of all: to kill something that no one else could kill.

Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.

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