Benjamin 2073 by Rjurik Davidson
My rating: 4/5 cats
“What’s next?” he said. “Marsupial lions? Giant wombats? Species snuffed out forty thousand years ago? When do we accept that extinction is extinction?” He waved his arms and his suit tightened around his armpits. Bureaucrats are all fashionistas, and style is so sharp and minimalist nowadays. Edges so hard they can cut you.
“The Russians are working on mammoths.” Somewhere in the background a lonely foghorn sounded.
Grimley pressed his clenched fists to his eyes in frustration. “They’re Russians. They’ve always been wild and utopian and impossible. And you, Ellie: You have some strange nostalgia for the past. It’s reactionary as fuck. We live forward, not backward. You’re needed elsewhere. Be reasonable.”
all of this because ellie and her team (now reduced to just herself and the loyal thien), have been unable lo these ten years to successfully bring back the thylacine. which, if you do not know, was this thing nature made one time when it was drunk using leftover parts of tigers and wolves, gilding the lily with a pouch and an alligator mouth before tossing it in australia with all the other bizarre beasts
and then it went extinct. for real. and in this story, set in 2073, in hobart, tasmania, where the very last thylacine died in captivity in 1936, someone is finally working on getting it back into circulation. it’s like Jurassic Park without all the peril: the thylacine’ll eat up your wallabies, but it won’t stomp your jeeps into dust. the challenges here are more bureaucratic and practical, and it’s about the frustrations of repeating the cycle of trying and failing to do one good thing within the brief span of a human life, being stripped of nearly everything but this one single-minded pursuit and stubbornly persisting until you achieve…conditional success.
still, if it gets us more of these little buddies
i’m into it.
raaaaaaar!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2020/05/13/benjam…
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