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The Tusks of Extinction

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novella

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?

A tense SF thriller from a new master of the genre.

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Published Jan 16, 2024

112 pages

Average rating: 7

4 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

Pferdina
Apr 25, 2025
8/10 stars
Short but very intense. Damira is a woman working to protect the last remaining elephants. She is also a de-extinct mammoth roaming the steppe.
Shahna
Jul 18, 2024
6/10 stars
I was sent an audio arc.

I was drawn in by the cover but stayed for the story.
A bunch of people messing with science!
We have to stop trying to bring things back from the dead and focus on what is currently still alive.
LucyCarrillo
Feb 17, 2024
4/10 stars
The brain of an elephant advocate, gets download it into a mammoth elephant centuries later. Scientists have somehow brought the mammoths back to life. Short story that follows the herd in the future, those that are trying to shoot them, mixed in with a love relationship of somebody who decides they can’t be with somebody who would shoot an elephant. For some reason, it all sounds really good and engrossing, but I had a hard time staying connected to it. 

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