Ray Nayler’s debut novel, The mountain in the sea (2022), told a reversed version of a first contact story. Instead of intelligent aliens from another world, humans encounter evidence of another species using tools and language here on Earth: a variety of octopuses. Nayler’s future was one in which non-human intelligence abounded, in the form of various levels of artificial intelligence, and in which people had so completely ignored and disrespected the natural world that they almost overlooked the dawn of a species just advanced right under the waves.
In Nayler’s similarly themed sequel, The Fangs of Extinction, poachers have exterminated the Earth’s wild elephants. Advances in cloning technology allow scientists to bring the woolly mammoth back to life. But mammoths don’t know how to be mammoths. So the scientists who cloned the giant creatures also resurrected a digital copy of a dead scientist and activist who, before she died, studied elephants in the wild.
As in Mountain, Fangs treats intelligence and consciousness as ghosts rather than simple binaries, painting a planet on which humans are not so special and animals, extinct and reborn, serve as moral competitors. In a world where new forms of intelligence seem to appear every day, her books raise vital questions about what qualities give value to a being.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “The Fangs of Extinction.”