The Tusks of Extinction

Ray Nayler's novella The Tusks of Extinction follows the consciousness of a scientist fighting elephant poaching, in her life before and after getting her brain scanned, archived, and eventually downloaded into an un-extincted mammoth. She is given the task of imparting mammoth culture to lab-grown mammoths cultured from recovered ancient DNA.

This was short and fairly bitter in outlook. The humans in the story are driven by capitalism, by environmental and social collapse, and by a lack of options. I'd describe this as a dark near-future science fiction, and I wouldn't recommend this to myself, although I can see why this joined my reading queue: the author also wrote a book about conscious cephalopods, The Mountain in the Sea.

The novella contained many tightly-written and resonant observations on the human condition. This excerpt (pages 95-96) reminded me of the kind of academic navel-gazing involved in grad school:

When Damira had been here last, she had simply been herself. But now, it felt like there were two of her---one sitting with her mother, eating in silence. And another watching them eat. As if she had stepped out of her own life. ... 

Damira realized what it was in that moment, as her fork scraped the bottom of her bowl. It was an effect of education. She was looking at everything. Analyzing it. Processing it. Her life wasn't just how things were anymore---it was only one possible way for things to be. And there were other possibilities, now. She had ceased to be trapped here, in this stuffy room. Ceased to be trapped inside her life, yes, but she had also ceased to be able to live her life without analyzing it. Without taking everything apart to look inside. 

Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.

This post's theme word is abulia (n), "the inability to make decisions." The goal of an education is to encourage both outward curiosity and introspection, but to stop short of intellectualized abulia.