"The Tusks of Extinction" with Ray Nayler (April 17th @ 12pm SLT)
I am inside a mammoth's heart and soul and it feels .... grand!
I read the first chapter of “The Tusks of Extinction” by
Nayler three times and not because Mr. Nayler is a bad writer but because he is quite BRILLIANT.I was thrown off by the world I was thrown into and I needed to ensure that my sense of self was still intact and operative. That I was not in fact an animal, a mammoth to be precise, but that I am still - what they/we call - a human being.
Darn it empathy: you are not really helping my goal here, the goal to be efficient, productive, outcome-oriented, or in short: to function as modern life under capitalism demands of me.
This slim volume follows Ray’s debut novel “The Mountain in the Sea” and one may ostensibly classify it as Eco-Fi (we shall Clari-Fy if the author himself is cool with this categorization, I am not even sure if I am, coz I hate the binary shelfing of art!)
Now I do NOT know how Ray does so much in 101 pages: how does he suceed to immerse me into a world with such rich characters, where I immediately feel the urgency of my responsibility as a human being to be good and kind and nurturing to all the other species I share this planet with, but where the incentive structure of that material world is drawing me and some/most of the characters into an ever narrower loop of ultimate self-destruction …
I mean, I do read a lot of well-resourced news articles on the man-made-destruction-of-species issue, I’d claim that I am aware of complexities, there is brilliant science journalism out there I consume frequently, there is activism, well-meaning advocacy documentaries in the audio-visual realm etc etc etc, voluminous volumes, with no end in sight!
So that is WHY I MUST KNOW why novels, novellas, short stories, fiction of all kinds, do what they do! I DEMAND ANSWERS and so must you, dear subscriber/Second Lifer, therefore we invited Ray Nayler back to SL to actually talk some story.
He will draw back the curtain. In under 90 minutes!
Tune in, stop by, pick up the book NOW … or AFTER.
See you in-world!