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by 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.
Dr. Damira Khismatullina, an expert in elephant behavior, was brutally murdered trying to defend the world's last elephants from the brutal ivory trade. Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.
As the herd's new matriarch, can Damira help fend off poachers long enough for the species to take hold? Or will her own ghosts, and Moscow's real reason for bringing the mammoth back, doom them to a new extinction?
Hugo Awards, 2025
"Nayler's (The Mountain in the Sea) compelling sci-fi thriller contemplates human greed and de-extinction through science. Highly recommended for readers of ecoterrorism thrillers and climate fiction." ―Library Journal (starred review)
"Impassioned and impressive…an uncompromising climate fiction that strikes like a spear to the gut." ―Publishers Weekly
"The Tusks of Extinction is a moving tribute to the beauty of beasts too often taken for granted and a musing on the gifts of nature; human's propensity toward violence and greed; and the hidden layers of meaning found in human interactions with the wild." ―Shelf Awareness
"Fans of biology-inspired sf will enjoy this short novel about human greed, the beauty of mammoths, and one human's consuming fury." ―Booklist
"Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction is a compact novella that reads like a superb science fiction inversion of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ―The New York Times
This information about The Tusks of Extinction was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ray Nayler is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Mountain in the Sea, which won the Locus Award for "Best First Novel," and was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Prize. Called "one of the up-and-coming masters of SF short fiction" by Locus, Nayler's stories have been published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, and Nightmare, as well as in many "Best Of" anthologies. His stories have won the Clarkesworld Readers' Poll and the Asimov's Readers' Award, and his novelette "Sarcophagus" was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Born in Quebec and raised in California, Nayler lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kosovo. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani, and Vietnamese. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He holds an MA in global diplomacy from the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London.
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