- The Good: Exploration of conservation and human consciousness in an animal body
- The Bad: Limited character development; confusing POV switches
- The Literary: Scifi with a serious theme
Dr. Damira Khismatullina is the world’s foremost expert in elephant behavior, and as African populations dwindle, she’ll do anything to protect them from ivory poachers. And in some near future, Svyatoslav, a 16-year-old boy, reluctantly hunts mammoths in the Siberian tundra with his father and their pack of poachers.
Ready yourself for some ecological heartbreak in this highly nominated novella about conservation and preventable extinction. Spoiler alert (although it’s also on the dust jacket), elephants are hunted to extinction. A hundred years in the future, Moscow scientists resurrect the mammoth. But mammoths are also targeted for ivory, so the future scientists decide to upload the digitized consciousness of Damira into a mammoth body, so she can teach the mammoths how to defend themselves.
Honestly, the early reveal of Damira’s consciousness uploaded into a mammoth body surprised me in a good way (I didn’t read the dust jacket). Unfortunately, the payoff, from a plot perspective, is minimal. Damira teaches the mammoths to attack and kill the human poachers, which seems an obvious solution that the mammoths could have figured out on their own. The vengeance is at least cathartic.
There are two timelines and four POVs, so you’ll need to pay attention in this one. Damira exists in both timelines, in the first one as a human and in the second as a mammoth, but her internal monologue is the same, so it can be difficult to distinguish the two. Two sets of hunters show very different sides of conservation theory. Svyatosloav’s group are poor simple villagers, while the other is a pro-mammoth group that allows very wealthy men to kill specific animals for sport, the proceeds of which benefit the organization. Damira and Svyatoslav timelines and POVs eventually come together in a satisfying friendship, and finally, one tense bittersweet breaking moment.
I really like the idea of this story and what it’s trying to do, but the act of reading it is just okay. Recommended for fans of ecological science fiction.