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The Terraformers
Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn't supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet's history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations.
Centuries later, Destry's protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that's buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn't Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they're threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur's very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they've built on Sask-E.
Centuries later, Destry's protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that's buying up huge swaths of the planet―a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn't Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they're threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur's very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they've built on Sask-E.
10 pages, Audible Audio
First published January 31, 2023
1169 people are currently reading
24673 people want to read
About the author
Annalee Newitz
61 books2,040 followersAnnalee Newitz is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology. They received a PhD in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley, and in 1997 published the widely cited book, White Trash: Race and Class in America. From 2004–2005 they were a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They write for many periodicals from 'Popular Science' to 'Wired,' and from 1999 to 2008 wrote a syndicated weekly column called 'Techsploitation.' They co-founded 'other' magazine in 2002, which was published triannually until 2007. Since 2008, they are editor-in-chief of 'io9,' a Gawker-owned science fiction blog, which was named in 2010 by The Times as one of the top science blogs on the internet.
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February 6, 2023
2.5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum https://bibliosanctum.com/2023/02/03/...
I wanted to like The Terraformers a lot more than I did. Needless to say, the premise, having been compared to the works of Becky Chambers and Martha Wells, immediately caught my attention. However, when taken as a whole, the execution of the novel made it a challenging one to embrace.
The story first starts by following Destry, a top network analyst working for the Environmental Rescue Team on the Earth-like planet Sask-E. Vat-grown specifically to perform her job, Destry’s duties include patrolling the surface of the planet overseeing terraforming efforts while riding on a bio-robotic moose mount named Whistle. So far, so awesome. But then Destry and her colleagues stumble upon a city hidden deep inside a volcano—a city that, if discovered by her superiors, would have deadly repercussions for everyone o Sask-E. Caught at a crossroads, Destry ultimately makes a choice that will ripple across generations and change everything for better or worse.
Skip forward then to hundreds of years later, the focus suddenly switches to a whole new direction. This first time jump was what started me down the path of disillusionment, realizing that not everything is as good as I believed it to be. It didn’t help that the author made me care about the characters and the scenario in the introduction, creating entire lives and histories, only to then turn around and pull the rug from under me, snatching me away from all the things I’d inevitably grown attached to. How rude!
Up to this point, the story had sensation of being heavily stage-managed, nothing really occurring organically, instead relying on character tropes and feel-good cliches—which wasn’t exactly a negative point against it. In fact, the vibes worked quite well for the lighthearted Wayfarers-type atmosphere and tone the novel was trying to establish. But the problem again arose with the abrupt and unceremonious way we were ripped from the first timeline, essentially hitting a reset button, and I was decidedly NOT as patient and forgiving the second time around. Almost immediately, characterization took a nosedive; for the rest of the book, I struggled to connect with anyone else for they all came across as either an embodiment of idealized goodness or pure depravity with no middle ground.
The tragedy of course is that The Terraformers contains much deeper ideas about environmental conservation, the concept of intelligence and what defines it, along with other such thought-provoking themes—even if the narrative sometimes goes about it in some goofy ass ways. Also, when they weren’t completely nonsensical, some of the messages in the book were laid on a bit too thick for my tastes. Still, in the end, none of it mattered anyway, because all of it was lost in the noise.
I honestly believe I would have enjoyed this novel more had it not been so frustrating. There were moments that truly shone, such as the first third of the book. Then there were the world-building elements involved, like the terraforming processes and engineered creatures, which were all very fascinating. The first section featuring Destry would have made an excellent standalone novella, for instance, or it could have been expanded into a more impactful novel. Instead, what The Terraformers ended up being was more like a collection of ideas cobbled together without a plot or focus to drive it. What ultimately made this book a middle-of-the-road read for me was its failure to pull it all together coherently, or for a overarching story to fully materialize. Rated 2.5 stars for potential unrealized.
I wanted to like The Terraformers a lot more than I did. Needless to say, the premise, having been compared to the works of Becky Chambers and Martha Wells, immediately caught my attention. However, when taken as a whole, the execution of the novel made it a challenging one to embrace.
The story first starts by following Destry, a top network analyst working for the Environmental Rescue Team on the Earth-like planet Sask-E. Vat-grown specifically to perform her job, Destry’s duties include patrolling the surface of the planet overseeing terraforming efforts while riding on a bio-robotic moose mount named Whistle. So far, so awesome. But then Destry and her colleagues stumble upon a city hidden deep inside a volcano—a city that, if discovered by her superiors, would have deadly repercussions for everyone o Sask-E. Caught at a crossroads, Destry ultimately makes a choice that will ripple across generations and change everything for better or worse.
Skip forward then to hundreds of years later, the focus suddenly switches to a whole new direction. This first time jump was what started me down the path of disillusionment, realizing that not everything is as good as I believed it to be. It didn’t help that the author made me care about the characters and the scenario in the introduction, creating entire lives and histories, only to then turn around and pull the rug from under me, snatching me away from all the things I’d inevitably grown attached to. How rude!
Up to this point, the story had sensation of being heavily stage-managed, nothing really occurring organically, instead relying on character tropes and feel-good cliches—which wasn’t exactly a negative point against it. In fact, the vibes worked quite well for the lighthearted Wayfarers-type atmosphere and tone the novel was trying to establish. But the problem again arose with the abrupt and unceremonious way we were ripped from the first timeline, essentially hitting a reset button, and I was decidedly NOT as patient and forgiving the second time around. Almost immediately, characterization took a nosedive; for the rest of the book, I struggled to connect with anyone else for they all came across as either an embodiment of idealized goodness or pure depravity with no middle ground.
The tragedy of course is that The Terraformers contains much deeper ideas about environmental conservation, the concept of intelligence and what defines it, along with other such thought-provoking themes—even if the narrative sometimes goes about it in some goofy ass ways. Also, when they weren’t completely nonsensical, some of the messages in the book were laid on a bit too thick for my tastes. Still, in the end, none of it mattered anyway, because all of it was lost in the noise.
I honestly believe I would have enjoyed this novel more had it not been so frustrating. There were moments that truly shone, such as the first third of the book. Then there were the world-building elements involved, like the terraforming processes and engineered creatures, which were all very fascinating. The first section featuring Destry would have made an excellent standalone novella, for instance, or it could have been expanded into a more impactful novel. Instead, what The Terraformers ended up being was more like a collection of ideas cobbled together without a plot or focus to drive it. What ultimately made this book a middle-of-the-road read for me was its failure to pull it all together coherently, or for a overarching story to fully materialize. Rated 2.5 stars for potential unrealized.
May 27, 2023
I found The Terraformers very enjoyable and quite smart. Also irritating. The characters—I think I was supposed to like almost all of them, Becky Chambers style. Unfortunately, I liked almost none of them. Tonally, the novel is all over the place. Actually, I love how dark the book gets without losing its lightness; it reminds me of a great animated movie in that way—Pinocchio or Spirited Away—pitch black if you can get past the talking animals (and oh, are there talking animals!)
On the sillier side, take this fairly representative passage: "A column rose up out of the stage, elevating a group of beavers who were setting up their instruments. Presently they began playing amplified keyboards and stringed gourds, slapping out a backbeat with their tails to make a jaunty dance tune. Unlike the streets around the Ziggurat, this bar's clientele included a lot of people who weren't hominids. Looking out over the tables, Sulfur could see cats, bots, quite a few naked mole rats [why?!?!], and a group of parrots sharing a gigantic bowl of tropical fruit spiked with rum" (180).
This, by the way, is the opening of a pole-dancing-cum-public-sex scene that I really hope is supposed to be as funny as it is.
At the same time, Newitz understands that when oppression is embedded in the structure of a society, it becomes simultaneously a nightmare, a commonplace, and a joke. Oh that? That's just our personal collective crime against humanity. Ha ha! We know it's wrong, but... The book's handling of slavery, of aptitude and intelligence, of what it means to be a person, are intense, bizarre, and interesting—if not always quite convincing.
In the end, the book falls into the classic far-future trap—mindbogglingly advanced technology paired with rhythms of daily life weirdly recognizable from 21st-century North America. There is an element of parody, thank God, a knowing wink at the absurdity. But still—contemporary nerd culture is not humanity's future! Sorry, friend. Neither is the neoliberal corporation, for that matter. There is an incoherence, here, in what has and hasn't changed after eons of interstellar colonization. Somehow, living for thousands of years affects people not one whit. Somehow, sentient earthworms are just another diversity and accessibility issue, and not a writhing ethical knot of terrifying proportions. But if there are moments when the book is just dumb, there are moments, too, of pure, chilling horror. A conversation late in the book between a corporate executive and her enslaved cook is truly spine-tingling.
Overall, The Terraformers is well worth reading. Like a lot of contemporary, socially-engaged science fiction, it reminds me a little of the counterculture-inflected new wave scifi of the 60s and 70s—simultaneously serious and seriously silly, with a heavy dose of social commentary and a dash of sexual wish-fulfillment (updated, of course, for the gender norms of the moment). After all, politics is lifestyle and lifestyle is politics—haven’t you heard?
On the sillier side, take this fairly representative passage: "A column rose up out of the stage, elevating a group of beavers who were setting up their instruments. Presently they began playing amplified keyboards and stringed gourds, slapping out a backbeat with their tails to make a jaunty dance tune. Unlike the streets around the Ziggurat, this bar's clientele included a lot of people who weren't hominids. Looking out over the tables, Sulfur could see cats, bots, quite a few naked mole rats [why?!?!], and a group of parrots sharing a gigantic bowl of tropical fruit spiked with rum" (180).
This, by the way, is the opening of a pole-dancing-cum-public-sex scene that I really hope is supposed to be as funny as it is.
At the same time, Newitz understands that when oppression is embedded in the structure of a society, it becomes simultaneously a nightmare, a commonplace, and a joke. Oh that? That's just our personal collective crime against humanity. Ha ha! We know it's wrong, but... The book's handling of slavery, of aptitude and intelligence, of what it means to be a person, are intense, bizarre, and interesting—if not always quite convincing.
In the end, the book falls into the classic far-future trap—mindbogglingly advanced technology paired with rhythms of daily life weirdly recognizable from 21st-century North America. There is an element of parody, thank God, a knowing wink at the absurdity. But still—contemporary nerd culture is not humanity's future! Sorry, friend. Neither is the neoliberal corporation, for that matter. There is an incoherence, here, in what has and hasn't changed after eons of interstellar colonization. Somehow, living for thousands of years affects people not one whit. Somehow, sentient earthworms are just another diversity and accessibility issue, and not a writhing ethical knot of terrifying proportions. But if there are moments when the book is just dumb, there are moments, too, of pure, chilling horror. A conversation late in the book between a corporate executive and her enslaved cook is truly spine-tingling.
Overall, The Terraformers is well worth reading. Like a lot of contemporary, socially-engaged science fiction, it reminds me a little of the counterculture-inflected new wave scifi of the 60s and 70s—simultaneously serious and seriously silly, with a heavy dose of social commentary and a dash of sexual wish-fulfillment (updated, of course, for the gender norms of the moment). After all, politics is lifestyle and lifestyle is politics—haven’t you heard?
February 4, 2023
I won an ARC of this from Tor in an Instagram giveaway.
This book had good promise, but fell flat on execution. I was very interested in the plot, the summary of it had me immediately. However, I found the characters to be extremely one dimensional and flat, and at no point did I ever feel invested. I called it roughly 60% in, I felt tired of it by page 60, but I wanted to at least give the second main storyline (the one 700 years into the future of the first storyline) a shot.
It seemed like nearly every character was either:
-Objectively good
-Objectively bad
-Nuanced, but not the focus
Obviously this was frustrating! And now, I can get down with plot-centric books. I like Foundation, one of the most plot-centric books there is. But everything here proceeded straightforwardly with no intricacies, and the characters were flat enough to make it a drag to read.
This book had good promise, but fell flat on execution. I was very interested in the plot, the summary of it had me immediately. However, I found the characters to be extremely one dimensional and flat, and at no point did I ever feel invested. I called it roughly 60% in, I felt tired of it by page 60, but I wanted to at least give the second main storyline (the one 700 years into the future of the first storyline) a shot.
It seemed like nearly every character was either:
-Objectively good
-Objectively bad
-Nuanced, but not the focus
Obviously this was frustrating! And now, I can get down with plot-centric books. I like Foundation, one of the most plot-centric books there is. But everything here proceeded straightforwardly with no intricacies, and the characters were flat enough to make it a drag to read.
February 2, 2023
DNF at 40%. I have no way to know if Newitz is a vegan, but this book falls into one of the most annoying pitfalls that vegans keep falling into, so I'm willing to venture they are.
This review is vaguely spoilery but I won't get much into the plot details.
The year is 50,000 and something and we're on some random space rock, bafflingly still deeply invested in capitalism and colonisation as an economic system. We are, however, terraforming the place, so a lot of cutesy innovative ways of insulting people have arisen, like calling each other a "polluting fool". This made the novel feel like Newitz hadn't really chosen an audience. It's meant to be an adult book but it often felt aimed at 10-year-olds. The relationship the protagonist has with her bioengineered companion moose also felt very Disney-coded, if said animal companions were having sex with other members of their own species. The tone was all over the place.
As far as I could grasp, the moral of this story is "protect the environment" at its most basic level, like an inspirational poster. This was conveyed not only by the uneven writing tone (the big evil cartoonish capitalist boss says "fucking", so apparently the only people who swear are the evil ones. Very PG-13), but also because of that pitfall I talked about earlier: everybody is human, whether or not they're human.
Now, let's focus on the difference between being "people" and being "human". In this book, to participate in society, individuals are afforded autonomy and given responsibilities, and considered "people". This is fine. What's not fine, however, is that this personhood is directly linked to whether or not you can talk and advocate for yourself. Being anything other than "people" is seen as insulting, and this concept of personhood is entirely human. Becky Chambers affords personhood to all sort of aliens in believable ways. Martha Wells also shines a light on what personhood may or may not mean. Contrastingly, Newitz has taken a very weird approach and made other animals behave like human beings to make them "equal".
There's a moment when the protagonist tells us it feels wrong to "take milk from someone who can't give you permission" or something to that effect. This is, of course, that old chestnut about humans being unable to have a non-parasitic relationship with any other animal. Unless the other animal is fully able to articulate their thoughts to us in a language we can understand, we must act like they can't consent to anything, because verbal consent is the only way you can be super mega sure about anything ever. This brings to the forefront the discussion about whether aphasic people are ever able to consent to anything, which is a bad take for several reasons. Being able to speak (or text) is not the only way to communicate and to imply so creates problems.
You can keep a cow and have a perfectly pleasant symbiotic relationship in which you feed them and keep them safe from predators and get milk in exchange from time to time, or you can keep that cow in terrible conditions and treat them as a commodity and then it becomes exploitative. Whether the cow can talk or not seems irrelevant. Believe me, if a cow doesn't want you to touch them, you'll know. They weigh almost a ton and can kick you. Other animals are perfectly able to make their needs, wants and boundaries known and it's not their responsibility to learn to speak English for us to treat them like individuals, but here we are. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
This review is vaguely spoilery but I won't get much into the plot details.
The year is 50,000 and something and we're on some random space rock, bafflingly still deeply invested in capitalism and colonisation as an economic system. We are, however, terraforming the place, so a lot of cutesy innovative ways of insulting people have arisen, like calling each other a "polluting fool". This made the novel feel like Newitz hadn't really chosen an audience. It's meant to be an adult book but it often felt aimed at 10-year-olds. The relationship the protagonist has with her bioengineered companion moose also felt very Disney-coded, if said animal companions were having sex with other members of their own species. The tone was all over the place.
As far as I could grasp, the moral of this story is "protect the environment" at its most basic level, like an inspirational poster. This was conveyed not only by the uneven writing tone (the big evil cartoonish capitalist boss says "fucking", so apparently the only people who swear are the evil ones. Very PG-13), but also because of that pitfall I talked about earlier: everybody is human, whether or not they're human.
Now, let's focus on the difference between being "people" and being "human". In this book, to participate in society, individuals are afforded autonomy and given responsibilities, and considered "people". This is fine. What's not fine, however, is that this personhood is directly linked to whether or not you can talk and advocate for yourself. Being anything other than "people" is seen as insulting, and this concept of personhood is entirely human. Becky Chambers affords personhood to all sort of aliens in believable ways. Martha Wells also shines a light on what personhood may or may not mean. Contrastingly, Newitz has taken a very weird approach and made other animals behave like human beings to make them "equal".
There's a moment when the protagonist tells us it feels wrong to "take milk from someone who can't give you permission" or something to that effect. This is, of course, that old chestnut about humans being unable to have a non-parasitic relationship with any other animal. Unless the other animal is fully able to articulate their thoughts to us in a language we can understand, we must act like they can't consent to anything, because verbal consent is the only way you can be super mega sure about anything ever. This brings to the forefront the discussion about whether aphasic people are ever able to consent to anything, which is a bad take for several reasons. Being able to speak (or text) is not the only way to communicate and to imply so creates problems.
You can keep a cow and have a perfectly pleasant symbiotic relationship in which you feed them and keep them safe from predators and get milk in exchange from time to time, or you can keep that cow in terrible conditions and treat them as a commodity and then it becomes exploitative. Whether the cow can talk or not seems irrelevant. Believe me, if a cow doesn't want you to touch them, you'll know. They weigh almost a ton and can kick you. Other animals are perfectly able to make their needs, wants and boundaries known and it's not their responsibility to learn to speak English for us to treat them like individuals, but here we are. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
December 3, 2022
GUT-PUNCHED with action from Page 1, you’re going to be spell-bound as this incredibly fleshed out tale erupts (pun intended, with Spider City!). I loved protagonist Destry right from the beginning, and Author Annalee Newitz writes in such an eloquent description of characters and locations you feel completely transported there, in the midst of so many current issues that are so highly debated and sometimes decisive—I loved it. This fantastic book takes you on so many different journeys both “physically” and mentally, and help you really question present-day thoughts on what’s truly happening to our world now, and the ecological impacts we’re individually and collectively doing that permanently changes the future, whether we want to admit it or not. A truly great read.
A special thanks to Tor publishers and Author Annalee Newitz for my ARC of “The Transformers” for an unbiased review.
A special thanks to Tor publishers and Author Annalee Newitz for my ARC of “The Transformers” for an unbiased review.
March 6, 2023
(1.5)
I’ve seen a little bit of negative (and, frankly, ignorant) commentary that this book is too vegan, too insistent in its criticism of capitalism, and too focused on liberal virtue signaling. It must be very difficult to read speculative fiction, or any book, if you’re expecting it to align with your real-world perspective. Anyway, as a vegan, anti-capitalist, progressive reader I can assure you with authority that this book is terrible in spite of any of its perceived values.
In fact, it’s too amateurish, heavy-handed, poorly conceived, and outright idiotic to warrant any real criticism at all. It reads like a junior high school report on colonialism written by a tween who thinks they’re much cleverer than they actually are. Late last year I read a non-fiction book by this author. While it wasn’t excellent, it was good enough to see a lot of potential in a sci-fi book written by someone who has spent time researching cities and civilizations. Alas, this is a failure on all fronts. Except for maybe the literal front, as the cover art appealed to me.
I’ve seen a little bit of negative (and, frankly, ignorant) commentary that this book is too vegan, too insistent in its criticism of capitalism, and too focused on liberal virtue signaling. It must be very difficult to read speculative fiction, or any book, if you’re expecting it to align with your real-world perspective. Anyway, as a vegan, anti-capitalist, progressive reader I can assure you with authority that this book is terrible in spite of any of its perceived values.
In fact, it’s too amateurish, heavy-handed, poorly conceived, and outright idiotic to warrant any real criticism at all. It reads like a junior high school report on colonialism written by a tween who thinks they’re much cleverer than they actually are. Late last year I read a non-fiction book by this author. While it wasn’t excellent, it was good enough to see a lot of potential in a sci-fi book written by someone who has spent time researching cities and civilizations. Alas, this is a failure on all fronts. Except for maybe the literal front, as the cover art appealed to me.
March 29, 2023
5 stars for the ideas
-1 star for being boring
-2 stars for all the characters, even those hundreds of years old,
sounding like teenagers, complete with raging hormones
_________________________________________
= 2 stars
I loved the author's Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (nonfiction) so I'm really disappointed in this novel.
-1 star for being boring
-2 stars for all the characters, even those hundreds of years old,
sounding like teenagers, complete with raging hormones
_________________________________________
= 2 stars
I loved the author's Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (nonfiction) so I'm really disappointed in this novel.
June 1, 2023
4.0 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/b3tb9fc_qTE
This is a smart science fiction novel with a quirky narrative. The tone is a little silly in places for my tastes, but I can still appreciate a story that is well constructed. I love seeing how the author created a fresh story within the tradition of terraforming narrative.
As a Canadian, I got a special joy from all the name references. This story is fun but still very intellectual.
While I never want to gatekeep, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to sci fi newbies. While not too complicated, I think this one would be better appreciated by readers who have already read the original terraforming stories and are looking for a new modern perspective.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
Video Review: https://youtu.be/b3tb9fc_qTE
This is a smart science fiction novel with a quirky narrative. The tone is a little silly in places for my tastes, but I can still appreciate a story that is well constructed. I love seeing how the author created a fresh story within the tradition of terraforming narrative.
As a Canadian, I got a special joy from all the name references. This story is fun but still very intellectual.
While I never want to gatekeep, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to sci fi newbies. While not too complicated, I think this one would be better appreciated by readers who have already read the original terraforming stories and are looking for a new modern perspective.
Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
March 21, 2023
The Terraformers is an expansive story set in the far distant future on Sask-E, a planet being terraformed by a private corporation for eventual profit. The novel is divided into three parts, spanning generations and is thematically focused on capitalism, personhood, gentrification, environmental protection, and the measuring of intelligence, among others.
But it's an interesting novel to review because while the themes and setting are expansive, the story is told from a very zoomed in perspective through the lives of specific characters living on the planet. It feels very human (if you will excuse my phrasing) while trying to do something much larger. Another reviewer (Thomas from SFF 180) said that it feels like marathoning three seasons of a TV show and I think that is the perfect way to put it. I enjoyed it, but there is a LOT crammed into the novel and it does make the pacing feel a bit uneven. Personally, I like the quieter more personal approach to telling this kind of story. And the sentient animals are fantastic (Whistle the moose is the best!).
It's interesting because while the world feels more "utopian" for queer folks in that it doesn't reproduce the same systems of oppression based on gender and sexuality, it is also very dystopian in the way that oppression still continues based on things like wealth, class, assumed intelligence, and species. There's a lot of nuance here and food for thought. While I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't work for some readers, I will be seeking out more from Newitz. I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, all opinions are my own.
But it's an interesting novel to review because while the themes and setting are expansive, the story is told from a very zoomed in perspective through the lives of specific characters living on the planet. It feels very human (if you will excuse my phrasing) while trying to do something much larger. Another reviewer (Thomas from SFF 180) said that it feels like marathoning three seasons of a TV show and I think that is the perfect way to put it. I enjoyed it, but there is a LOT crammed into the novel and it does make the pacing feel a bit uneven. Personally, I like the quieter more personal approach to telling this kind of story. And the sentient animals are fantastic (Whistle the moose is the best!).
It's interesting because while the world feels more "utopian" for queer folks in that it doesn't reproduce the same systems of oppression based on gender and sexuality, it is also very dystopian in the way that oppression still continues based on things like wealth, class, assumed intelligence, and species. There's a lot of nuance here and food for thought. While I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't work for some readers, I will be seeking out more from Newitz. I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, all opinions are my own.
October 8, 2022
One of the blurbs I saw for this book suggested it for fans of Becky Chambers, and I get it, because, like Chambers, this book is a character-focused, optimistic look at a possible future in which people take care of each other in a world of very cool technologies. But this book is a long, sprawling epic, telling the story of the terraforming of a whole planet over thousands of years. And somehow still cozy. A cozy sprawling epic should be impossible, and yet, here it is, just waiting for you to add a nice hot beverage and a very, very long bath.
In this universe, "people" might be almost anyone, hominids, animals, or artificial intelligences. We're following the story of the Rangers charged with forming and protecting the environment of a developing planet, and the corporations whose goal is selling that planet as homo sapiens-only vacation properties for the very wealthy. It's the best of environmentalism versus the worst of capitalism, with world-building so well done that by the time you get to the subplot about the train falling in love with the cat, it won't even seem strange to you, and your reaction will simply be, "Aw, they make such a sweet couple." This is Newitz's best work yet.
In this universe, "people" might be almost anyone, hominids, animals, or artificial intelligences. We're following the story of the Rangers charged with forming and protecting the environment of a developing planet, and the corporations whose goal is selling that planet as homo sapiens-only vacation properties for the very wealthy. It's the best of environmentalism versus the worst of capitalism, with world-building so well done that by the time you get to the subplot about the train falling in love with the cat, it won't even seem strange to you, and your reaction will simply be, "Aw, they make such a sweet couple." This is Newitz's best work yet.
May 13, 2023
I have very mixed feelings about The Terraformers. The last section/timeline of the book would have made an excellent novella and was definitely my favorite part. However the middle section seemed to be a rather dull attempt at a Becky Chambers novel. The first section was somewhat in between the the other two so I feel like 3 stars is the most fitting.
I am glad I read the book and liked the sci-fi behind it. However I don't think it is one I'd read again as it was a tad boring and hard to get through (except for the last section).
I am glad I read the book and liked the sci-fi behind it. However I don't think it is one I'd read again as it was a tad boring and hard to get through (except for the last section).
May 4, 2024
Have you ever been stuck in a conversation with someone, and you agree with everything they say while also wishing they would stop talking? That was what reading this book felt like.
I will start by saying that the concept of this book and its world-building is very clever and very creative. The idea of a far future where humans have not only explored space but also started terraforming new planets is amazing, and I appreciate the realism of assuming corporations will have taken that idea and ruined it by privatizing everything and trademarking the genetic modifications that have allowed hominids to live long and healthy lives. What does that mean for the daily lives of those sworn to protect the ecosystem, or people simply trying to live their lives peacefully? Will space exploration and new planets really solve the problems we created on Earth?
This book is composed of three separate but connected stories, set on the planet Sask-E, several hundreds of years apart. Those stories are about trans-humanism, ecological preservation, sustainability, person-hood, freedom of actions and speech, housing accessibility. All things that I consider to be very important and that I want to see discussed more in sci-fi, which has traditionally always been a wonderful genre with which to discuss real world issues. And yet, I couldn't wait to be done with this damn book, I really dragged my heels every time I picked it up.
It has been compared to Becky Chambers' "Wayfarer" series, which I love passionately. I'm sorry to say it's not on the same level. Chambers writes characters that I wanted to be friends with, whose lives I wanted to be a part of and for whom I rooted, even when they were dickish characters (looking at you, Corbin!). Of course I was on Newitz's characters' side, but more because they themselves stood up to corporations and greedy, disconnected executives who only cared for their own ambitions than because I felt anything for them.
This was a bummer. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to make me feel the way Chambers' books make me feel, and it just grated me. For all it's claim to be about people, this book's characters did not have the flesh and blood feeling that would have made me fall in love with its ideas.
I will start by saying that the concept of this book and its world-building is very clever and very creative. The idea of a far future where humans have not only explored space but also started terraforming new planets is amazing, and I appreciate the realism of assuming corporations will have taken that idea and ruined it by privatizing everything and trademarking the genetic modifications that have allowed hominids to live long and healthy lives. What does that mean for the daily lives of those sworn to protect the ecosystem, or people simply trying to live their lives peacefully? Will space exploration and new planets really solve the problems we created on Earth?
This book is composed of three separate but connected stories, set on the planet Sask-E, several hundreds of years apart. Those stories are about trans-humanism, ecological preservation, sustainability, person-hood, freedom of actions and speech, housing accessibility. All things that I consider to be very important and that I want to see discussed more in sci-fi, which has traditionally always been a wonderful genre with which to discuss real world issues. And yet, I couldn't wait to be done with this damn book, I really dragged my heels every time I picked it up.
It has been compared to Becky Chambers' "Wayfarer" series, which I love passionately. I'm sorry to say it's not on the same level. Chambers writes characters that I wanted to be friends with, whose lives I wanted to be a part of and for whom I rooted, even when they were dickish characters (looking at you, Corbin!). Of course I was on Newitz's characters' side, but more because they themselves stood up to corporations and greedy, disconnected executives who only cared for their own ambitions than because I felt anything for them.
This was a bummer. I wanted to love it, I wanted it to make me feel the way Chambers' books make me feel, and it just grated me. For all it's claim to be about people, this book's characters did not have the flesh and blood feeling that would have made me fall in love with its ideas.
June 10, 2023
This is an environmental social heavily message-oriented SF novel. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for June 2023 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. The book was published in 2023 and quite possibly will end up among the next year's SFF awards nominees (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc.) for the author already has been nominated several times for both her fiction and her SFF activism (her fancast Our Opinions Are Correct is three-times Hugo winner).
This ought to have been a story that presses all my pleasure buttons – it has (as the name suggests) terraforming with its many issues, talking uplifted animals, real-life issues ‘guised’ as SF ones. However, on almost every topic it fell short, or it was just me in a grumpy mood.
The story starts on the planet Sask-E, which is in the process of millennia-old terraforming process. There is a conflict between the formal owner and investor – corporation Verdance and people, who do the actual hands-on work on the surface, among them the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT). The year is 59’006 (the founding of ERT and Great Bargain, definitely faaaar future) and ERT Ranger Destry Thomas sees that someone ‘destroys’ the environment she and others put centuries growing up – some kind of H. sapiens, which is a dirty slur here, is making a cabin, burning wood and skinning small animals. The Ranger has a unique sensory system, allowing her to ‘feel’ problems of the surrounding environment, be it a lack of specific materials or another disequilibrium.
This turns out that there is one of the potential buyers – Verdance advertises the planet as the Pleistocene, the purest environment for mankind, for those dreaming of old good days (really old in this case). And this guy is not even a person – he is a remote, a doll operated from elsewhere. This doesn’t preclude him from being a jerk and after he doesn’t comply, she just shoots him (remote) dead. This is interesting on several levels, including the likely suggestion that the name Destry comes from US 1939 movie Destry Rides Again, where the hero brings civility to a wild western town by refusing to wear a gun. Here, Destry uses a gun and then tries to cover what she has done.
The Ranger is accompanied by a talking flying moose named Whistle and he is an example of ERT approach - We are not humans and animals. We are allies in the Great Bargain. It seems that long ago, when Earth was on a brink of environmental collapse, ERT found a way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. The ERT started with domesticated animals—ungulates, birds, small mammals, model organisms like rats—and over the millennia since, rangers had invited more species into the Great Bargain as their opinions became necessary for land management. (why only land, not e.g. water isn’t specified). These uplifted animals are people (even if not Homo) and even here evildoers introduced a barrier - InAss ratings (the League’s “intelligence assessment” rating system), which allows treating some people as property. In the case of Whistle the moose – he is a mount, not a person (with which the Ranger vehemently disagrees). The sentient animals and social conflicts they create aren’t new in SF – from Cordwainer Smith in the 1950s to David Brin in the 1980s to cite just two. However, I guess using them as partners in protecting the ecosystem is new.
Back to the story, now let me see an example of what irked me a great deal throughout the novel – it is implicitly assumed that good people do good things. The jerk from the piece above got his due for hunting animals and playing a primitive man. Ok, but later good people change a course of a major river and it is fine. Heck, it just coincided that I’ve read it when Russian occupiers blew off the dam of Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. The dam held back a reservoir equal in volume to the Great Salt Lake, so now the lands below it are flooded, with massive destruction of property, the number of victims yet unknown. The negative consequences of the flooding are likely to be felt for years. However, the Ranger, who killed a remote for hunting a few animals has no problem with whole habitats destroyed, if good people do it, for they have needs.
As the story progresses there are several modern problems hot in the USA presented in the future, that have quite different tech and problems, among which are: public transport, the need for bigger government (against corporations), gentrification (which evicts poorer people), carbon neutrality. Are these issues important? Yes, moreover, I’m in line with the author’s views on most of them (as far as I understand them). But this is faaar future – they don’t burn hydrocarbon fuels, the husbandry is for a selected few – is at that planet carbon neutrality that important with its small population and clean energy? Public transport is important now in the US because the policy of two cars per family leads among other things to traffic jams and huge areas devoted to parking. But at that planet we have clean anti-grav, allowing for 3D movement, solving both issues. And so on, activist message made poor SF for it has linked present problems with future tech, which makes them obsolete.
This ought to have been a story that presses all my pleasure buttons – it has (as the name suggests) terraforming with its many issues, talking uplifted animals, real-life issues ‘guised’ as SF ones. However, on almost every topic it fell short, or it was just me in a grumpy mood.
The story starts on the planet Sask-E, which is in the process of millennia-old terraforming process. There is a conflict between the formal owner and investor – corporation Verdance and people, who do the actual hands-on work on the surface, among them the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT). The year is 59’006 (the founding of ERT and Great Bargain, definitely faaaar future) and ERT Ranger Destry Thomas sees that someone ‘destroys’ the environment she and others put centuries growing up – some kind of H. sapiens, which is a dirty slur here, is making a cabin, burning wood and skinning small animals. The Ranger has a unique sensory system, allowing her to ‘feel’ problems of the surrounding environment, be it a lack of specific materials or another disequilibrium.
This turns out that there is one of the potential buyers – Verdance advertises the planet as the Pleistocene, the purest environment for mankind, for those dreaming of old good days (really old in this case). And this guy is not even a person – he is a remote, a doll operated from elsewhere. This doesn’t preclude him from being a jerk and after he doesn’t comply, she just shoots him (remote) dead. This is interesting on several levels, including the likely suggestion that the name Destry comes from US 1939 movie Destry Rides Again, where the hero brings civility to a wild western town by refusing to wear a gun. Here, Destry uses a gun and then tries to cover what she has done.
The Ranger is accompanied by a talking flying moose named Whistle and he is an example of ERT approach - We are not humans and animals. We are allies in the Great Bargain. It seems that long ago, when Earth was on a brink of environmental collapse, ERT found a way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. The ERT started with domesticated animals—ungulates, birds, small mammals, model organisms like rats—and over the millennia since, rangers had invited more species into the Great Bargain as their opinions became necessary for land management. (why only land, not e.g. water isn’t specified). These uplifted animals are people (even if not Homo) and even here evildoers introduced a barrier - InAss ratings (the League’s “intelligence assessment” rating system), which allows treating some people as property. In the case of Whistle the moose – he is a mount, not a person (with which the Ranger vehemently disagrees). The sentient animals and social conflicts they create aren’t new in SF – from Cordwainer Smith in the 1950s to David Brin in the 1980s to cite just two. However, I guess using them as partners in protecting the ecosystem is new.
Back to the story, now let me see an example of what irked me a great deal throughout the novel – it is implicitly assumed that good people do good things. The jerk from the piece above got his due for hunting animals and playing a primitive man. Ok, but later good people change a course of a major river and it is fine. Heck, it just coincided that I’ve read it when Russian occupiers blew off the dam of Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. The dam held back a reservoir equal in volume to the Great Salt Lake, so now the lands below it are flooded, with massive destruction of property, the number of victims yet unknown. The negative consequences of the flooding are likely to be felt for years. However, the Ranger, who killed a remote for hunting a few animals has no problem with whole habitats destroyed, if good people do it, for they have needs.
As the story progresses there are several modern problems hot in the USA presented in the future, that have quite different tech and problems, among which are: public transport, the need for bigger government (against corporations), gentrification (which evicts poorer people), carbon neutrality. Are these issues important? Yes, moreover, I’m in line with the author’s views on most of them (as far as I understand them). But this is faaar future – they don’t burn hydrocarbon fuels, the husbandry is for a selected few – is at that planet carbon neutrality that important with its small population and clean energy? Public transport is important now in the US because the policy of two cars per family leads among other things to traffic jams and huge areas devoted to parking. But at that planet we have clean anti-grav, allowing for 3D movement, solving both issues. And so on, activist message made poor SF for it has linked present problems with future tech, which makes them obsolete.
July 9, 2023
Fascinating worldbuilding is a recurring theme when you read Newitz's novels. They will capture you with their description, but also sweep you away with well-maintained pacing. All of their novels almost have no fillers, and The Terraformers amazed me since in just 350 or so pages they manage to weave a thousand years or more stories of the 'people' and bots living in a planet called Sask-E. My mind is blown in almost every chapter. And for those hard SF afficionados, you won't be disappointed with the scientific parts - the amount of research from planetary science to river mechanics and geoscience was definitely no joke.
But that's not all. The soft SF part - political, anthropology, etc - was intriguing too. This is a kind of book that make you questions stuff, what's your position on such and such issue/scenario? It will challenge you. You might be uncomfortable, or completely disagree with whatever decision the author made for their characters, but at least the book will make you think and that is exactly what I want from my SF. Looking forward to the next book already!
But that's not all. The soft SF part - political, anthropology, etc - was intriguing too. This is a kind of book that make you questions stuff, what's your position on such and such issue/scenario? It will challenge you. You might be uncomfortable, or completely disagree with whatever decision the author made for their characters, but at least the book will make you think and that is exactly what I want from my SF. Looking forward to the next book already!
March 6, 2023
You either like Annalee Newitz or you don't. They are uniquely both subtle and in your face about class, capitalism, and the surveillance state. They’re both angry and optimistic, jaded and sweetly innocent, incredibly complicated and devastatingly simple.
Personally, I love the imagination and audacity of their storytelling and all the competing ideas and feelings they brings to the table. I like the way they write, and I like the way their books engage me on so many levels.
In this ancient northern city, survivors of the Lefthand Massacre weren't simply traumatized refugees. They became memes that hurtled across the galaxy. And the story of their experiences became cosmic radiation, ripping minuscule but dangerous holes in structures of power that had stood for thousands of years.
Personally, I love the imagination and audacity of their storytelling and all the competing ideas and feelings they brings to the table. I like the way they write, and I like the way their books engage me on so many levels.
In this ancient northern city, survivors of the Lefthand Massacre weren't simply traumatized refugees. They became memes that hurtled across the galaxy. And the story of their experiences became cosmic radiation, ripping minuscule but dangerous holes in structures of power that had stood for thousands of years.
March 15, 2023
Following their second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz published Four Lost Cities, a nonfiction book about some of the earliest examples of urban life in human history. The Terraformers, Newitz’s long-awaited third novel, builds on that subject with a story about designer worlds and urban planning set more than sixty thousand years in the future. It’s not a long book, but it has massive scope, with an episodic structure that makes reading it feel like you’ve just binged three seasons of a TV series. It can be more than a little uneven. But on balance, the story’s impact is formidable, a solidly adult work of problem-solving science fiction that feels both old-school and beautifully innovative at once.
The world is Sask-E, under development by the Verdance corporation as a bespoke planet for wealthy clients seeking prime real estate in a virginal Pleistocene environment. Towards that goal, Verdance has created their own genetically engineered people, with lifespans that cover centuries, to live on Sask-E and oversee the process of ecosystem maintenance as members of the Environmental Rescue Team.
But “people” refers to more than just Homo sapiens in this future. In a manner reminiscent of David Brin’s Uplift series, the Great Bargain was a process that followed a series of eco-wars on Earth that brought about the end of the anthropocene, by which millions of animal species were bootstrapped into sapience. Naturally, this provides the story with one of its main sources of conflict: Verdance’s entire terraforming project relies on a slave labor force of living beings the company decanted and therefore legally own as property. The ethics of it get worse when we learn some species have been developed with inhibitors on their intelligence to enforce compliance.
The narrative spans over 1600 years, and begins when Ranger Destry Thomas of the ERT discovers that an entire hidden city exists inside an active volcano, Mt. Spider. Spider City is populated by Archaeans, some of the earliest people to be decanted by Verdance, whose intended role was to get the whole process of terraforming going and then die off as they were no longer needed. But die off they didn’t, and now they want their independence, including access to an adjacent river. (Continued...)
The world is Sask-E, under development by the Verdance corporation as a bespoke planet for wealthy clients seeking prime real estate in a virginal Pleistocene environment. Towards that goal, Verdance has created their own genetically engineered people, with lifespans that cover centuries, to live on Sask-E and oversee the process of ecosystem maintenance as members of the Environmental Rescue Team.
But “people” refers to more than just Homo sapiens in this future. In a manner reminiscent of David Brin’s Uplift series, the Great Bargain was a process that followed a series of eco-wars on Earth that brought about the end of the anthropocene, by which millions of animal species were bootstrapped into sapience. Naturally, this provides the story with one of its main sources of conflict: Verdance’s entire terraforming project relies on a slave labor force of living beings the company decanted and therefore legally own as property. The ethics of it get worse when we learn some species have been developed with inhibitors on their intelligence to enforce compliance.
The narrative spans over 1600 years, and begins when Ranger Destry Thomas of the ERT discovers that an entire hidden city exists inside an active volcano, Mt. Spider. Spider City is populated by Archaeans, some of the earliest people to be decanted by Verdance, whose intended role was to get the whole process of terraforming going and then die off as they were no longer needed. But die off they didn’t, and now they want their independence, including access to an adjacent river. (Continued...)
January 12, 2024
So I think it took me as long to read this book as the terraforming did. Libby tells me I spent 13+ hours reading it. Libby also told me I checked it out 44 weeks ago (I didn’t start it until Oct. 31st though - only 10.5 weeks ago) and I have one page left and at this rate I should finish it in 4 hours and 25 minutes!! LOL
At any rate, this was a book I probably should listened to rather than trying to slog through eye-reading it. But then I wouldn’t have been able to speed read through the endless descriptions of what things were like, how they were set up, how building ls were grown, what people wore, what they ate, how they slept, their relationships and sex in the far far future. I’m glad I read it though, so now I can talk about it with 2 of my GR groups.
I did like the idea that in this future anything could become a person, including what we would consider inanimate objects, like trains for instance. Virtually every animal and all robots and drones had sentience. But there also existed horrible people who would purposefully limit a person’s intelligence/language capabilities, which I found horrifying. There were a lot of cool things, perhaps too many, and the author dwelt on descriptions way too long, IMHO.
I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t love it.
At any rate, this was a book I probably should listened to rather than trying to slog through eye-reading it. But then I wouldn’t have been able to speed read through the endless descriptions of what things were like, how they were set up, how building ls were grown, what people wore, what they ate, how they slept, their relationships and sex in the far far future. I’m glad I read it though, so now I can talk about it with 2 of my GR groups.
I did like the idea that in this future anything could become a person, including what we would consider inanimate objects, like trains for instance. Virtually every animal and all robots and drones had sentience. But there also existed horrible people who would purposefully limit a person’s intelligence/language capabilities, which I found horrifying. There were a lot of cool things, perhaps too many, and the author dwelt on descriptions way too long, IMHO.
I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t love it.
January 7, 2024
DNF @38%
I really tried to get into this book, just didn't grab me.
I just can't relate to creatures? Animals? People? Some mix of any and all possible living things? Whom live for centuries? But act like teenagers?
I just have no understanding of the world or the living things that inhabit it, which is making me bored and starting to skim.
I really tried to get into this book, just didn't grab me.
I just can't relate to creatures? Animals? People? Some mix of any and all possible living things? Whom live for centuries? But act like teenagers?
I just have no understanding of the world or the living things that inhabit it, which is making me bored and starting to skim.
April 26, 2023
Things I liked:
- The title suits what the book is about.
- Pierogi were mentioned, even if they were lentil-filled atrocities.
- Themes of inclusiveness.
- Terraforming is an interesting element. The author discusses it in some detail.
Things I did not like:
- The back cover gives away all of the plot.
- Humor is not to my taste, being based mainly on mentions of excrement or bodily functions
- The world-building is lackluster. This is a shame because there is a lot detail given to ecological/ biological features. Important aspects of the world are not well established. What are the real differences between mounts and bots and cyborgs?
- My main gripe with this book is with the inconsistency of the strong vegan theme. The definition of ‘people’ is unfortunately unclear. This is highly disturbing.
- My second issue with the vegan themes expressed is that the concept of “people” and ‘intelligence” is very human-centric. A “person” is a being that acts like a human. “Intelligence” is linked to speaking as a human. This is such a wasted opportunity to get creative and show something different. I have heard Annalee Newitz compared to Becky Chambers. I have only read one book by Becky Chambers but she did a good job of coming up with and showing different cultures/ family structures/ ways of experiencing sexuality/ communication/ genders in Wayfarers # 1. This book lost an opportunity to do the same.
- Inconsistency of tone. A lot of this was slice of life
- Shallow characterization leads to issues I suspect this is because I did not feel that we knew the characters well enough to understand them or differentiate them. They all blended together and none stood out, especially in time periods 2 and 3.
- Maybe three time periods was too much to have all together. Maybe this would have worked better as a short story of time period 1 with Destry and Whistle. That was the only moderately interesting part of the book for me
March 7, 2023
I almost did not finish ‘The Terraformers’ by Annalee Newitz because it is ultimately boring. I did finish it. The speculative technology is amazingly fun and innovative! But I was unaware the book would be changing almost all of the main characters every 100 pages, more or less. It was a little distressing when the characters I became attached to disappeared. I became less attached to the book, full stop.
Each of the three sections of the book, representing a progression of a thousand or so years passing and another generation of characters taking over the narration, showcased how a planet called Sask-E changed from an uninhabitable planet with the wrong kind of air for H. Sapiens to a thriving terraformed center of commerce with thousands of different lifeforms. I was reminded of The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (start here - Red Mars).
Unfortunately for many readers, the novel is more of a 300-page tour about an imagined future of designed lab-grown lifeforms, sentient robots and amazing ‘green’ technology. The characters are interesting, but they are completely washed away in an ocean of extensive technological world-building. As a book of speculative science and technology, the novel is fantastic. As an engrossing novel of science fiction, the book sucks - unless a reader really wants to read what is primarily an overview of speculative body reshaping and how such technology might affect societies.
The three parts are:
-Settlers (year 59,006, mission - Ecosystem Maintenance)
-Public Works (59,706, mission - Survey for Intercity Transit)
-Gentrifiers (60,610, mission, Serve the Public)
Newitz shows how technology shapes the planet, politics and its people. Apparently, the politics isn’t very different from Earth’s real-life colonial history. And, as is the usual, the advanced technology, owned by those ‘Who Have’ politicians and business corporations, is used to abuse others. Some of the available tech controls some of the various populations mostly through physical limits on their intelligence, and by installing spying devices into their bodies. These sentient beings are ‘slaved’ to corporate bosses or rich owners. Free sentients, with their brains intact, are grown in the planet’s one free city, called Spider City. There are sentient trains, animals and robots. People are grown from manipulated gene stocks, with some populations being similar to Neanderthals. The Neanderthal-like individuals, part of an enormously varied group of people called H. Diversus, were designed to breathe and work on Sask-E while it was being terraformed. They now mostly live under a volcano in Spider City, where the old air of Sask-E is still used. After the initial terraforming was done by the Neanderthal-like beings, H. Sapiens, with their many different altered body forms depending on personal caprice, or their rented non-sentient robot bodies they are ported into, arrive. They now all work and live on Sask-E in most of its cities and farms along with a lot of sentient creatures and robots. Even earthworms have been given sentience.
Gentle reader, sentient earthworms could have been fun! But no. They aren’t given much to do in this novel.
The planet is considered a private entity since everyone and everything, at least those not from free Spider City, belongs to private enterprises. Each city is a separate competitor of the other cities similar to the city-states of the ancient Greeks, except governance is done by competing corporate interests.
By the third part, lower-class citizens in many of the cities, and everyone from Spider City, are seething because of the stranglehold on the planet by the corporations. Eventually, the elites begin evicting the less fortunate from their homes. The controlling corporations want to tear down the older communities of servants and workers and build more elite residential towers. Tent towns, which became necessary as a result, are being attacked and razed. Spider City is also being threatened from losing its status as free. A corporation wants to wipe it out and build a transport service where Spider City used to be.
Can Moose the journalist cat and Scrubjay the train stop the corporations, especially the rapacious robot human Cylindra, owner of the city Emerald?
This novel had a lot of possible joy in it, but I couldn’t find much beyond reading about amazing biological/mechanical critters. They have PG-16 sex! One scene. There is that….
It is a lot of fun to go to creative future-world expo’s where creative scientists and writers imagine how technology can change the world! I have to admit going to fairs are much more fun than reading this novel for me. So, I am going on a sideways tour in my review, which has become necessarily about showing creative inventions about the future of science-based technology. Just because. Bite me.
My hometown of Seattle had a World’s Fair in 1962. It was fascinating to see the future world exposition that predominated in this fair. I was a little girl, but possibly going to Seattle’s fair is why science fiction is my favorite genre (mysteries are my second favorite, probably because of my childhood - another story).
The Seattle fair was full of possible future inventions and designs for the home, work, and outer space. One of its developments, the Space Needle, is still standing. It has become an iconic landmark. But it has been remodeled, and some of its original use by ordinary middle-class folk was lost, like free admittance. I remember the excitement of eating in the restaurant at the top, 620 feet up, which was on a turntable mechanism.
Almost all of the exhibits, like the Space Needle, have been completely redone into something else. The Bubbleater, a real wonder to me at age 7, is probably in pieces in a garbage dump. Still, if done right, imagining the future can be done in an exciting manner whether one is reading a novel or attending a fair!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century...
The Century 21 Exposition (also known as the Seattle World's Fair) was a world's fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair.
As planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works; some credit it with revitalizing Seattle's economic and cultural life (see History of Seattle since 1940). The fair saw the construction of the Space Needle and Alweg monorail, as well as several sports venues (Washington State Coliseum, now Climate Pledge Arena) and performing arts buildings (the Playhouse, now the Cornish Playhouse), most of which have since been replaced or heavily remodeled. Unlike some other world's fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit.
The site, slightly expanded since the fair, is now called Seattle Center; the United States Science Pavilion is now the Pacific Science Center. Another notable Seattle Center building, the Museum of Pop Culture (earlier called EMP Museum), was built nearly 40 years later and designed to fit in with the fairground atmosphere.
With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".
The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s. Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology.[6] In contrast, 12 years later—even in far more conservative Spokane, Washington—Expo '74 took environmentalism as its central theme. The theme of Spokane's Expo '74 was "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment.".
The grounds of the fair were divided into:
World of Science
World of Century 21 (also known as World of Tomorrow)
World of Commerce and Industry
World of Art
World of Entertainment
Show Street
Gayway
Boulevards of the World
Exhibit Fair
Food and Favors
Food Circus
World of Century 21
The Washington State Coliseum, financed by the state of Washington, was one of Thiry's own architectural contributions to the fairgrounds. His original conception had been staging the entire fair under a single giant air-conditioned tent-like structure, "a city of its own", but there were neither the budgets nor the tight agreements on concept to realize that vision. In the end, he got exactly enough of a budget to design and build a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) building suitable to hold a variety of exhibition spaces and equally suitable for later conversion to a sports arena and convention facility.
Pavilion of Electric Power
During the festival, the building hosted several exhibits. Nearly half of its surface area was occupied by the state's own circular exhibit "Century 21—The Threshold and the Threat", also known as the "World of Tomorrow" exhibit, billed as a "21-minute tour of the future". The building also housed exhibits by France, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), General Motors (GM), the American Library Association (ALA), and RCA, as well as a Washington state tourist center.
In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe.
Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night. The next cluster of cubes zoomed in on a vision of a high-tech, future home in a sylvan setting (and a commuter gyrocopter); a series of projections contrasted this "best of the future" to "the worst of the present" (over-uniform suburbs, a dreary urban housing project).
GM's Firebird III
The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway). There was also an "office of the future", a climate-controlled "farm factory", an automated offshore kelp and plankton harvesting farm, a vision of the schools of the future with "electronic storehouses of knowledge", and a vision of the many recreations that technology would free humans to pursue.
Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".
Under the same roof, the ALA exhibited a "library of the future" (centered on a Univac computer). GM exhibited its vision for highways and vehicles of the future (the latter including the Firebird III). Pan Am exhibited a giant globe that emphasized the notion that we had come to be able to think of distances between major world cities in hours and minutes rather than in terms of chancy voyages over great distances. RCA (which produced "The Threshold and the Threat") exhibited television, radio, and stereo technology, as well as its involvement in space. The French government had an exhibit with its own take on technological progress. Finally, a Washington state tourist center provided information for fair-goers wishing to tour the state.
I wish ‘The Terraformers’ had emphasized the sizzle of speculative science more, like the Seattle Fair.
Each of the three sections of the book, representing a progression of a thousand or so years passing and another generation of characters taking over the narration, showcased how a planet called Sask-E changed from an uninhabitable planet with the wrong kind of air for H. Sapiens to a thriving terraformed center of commerce with thousands of different lifeforms. I was reminded of The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (start here - Red Mars).
Unfortunately for many readers, the novel is more of a 300-page tour about an imagined future of designed lab-grown lifeforms, sentient robots and amazing ‘green’ technology. The characters are interesting, but they are completely washed away in an ocean of extensive technological world-building. As a book of speculative science and technology, the novel is fantastic. As an engrossing novel of science fiction, the book sucks - unless a reader really wants to read what is primarily an overview of speculative body reshaping and how such technology might affect societies.
The three parts are:
-Settlers (year 59,006, mission - Ecosystem Maintenance)
-Public Works (59,706, mission - Survey for Intercity Transit)
-Gentrifiers (60,610, mission, Serve the Public)
Newitz shows how technology shapes the planet, politics and its people. Apparently, the politics isn’t very different from Earth’s real-life colonial history. And, as is the usual, the advanced technology, owned by those ‘Who Have’ politicians and business corporations, is used to abuse others. Some of the available tech controls some of the various populations mostly through physical limits on their intelligence, and by installing spying devices into their bodies. These sentient beings are ‘slaved’ to corporate bosses or rich owners. Free sentients, with their brains intact, are grown in the planet’s one free city, called Spider City. There are sentient trains, animals and robots. People are grown from manipulated gene stocks, with some populations being similar to Neanderthals. The Neanderthal-like individuals, part of an enormously varied group of people called H. Diversus, were designed to breathe and work on Sask-E while it was being terraformed. They now mostly live under a volcano in Spider City, where the old air of Sask-E is still used. After the initial terraforming was done by the Neanderthal-like beings, H. Sapiens, with their many different altered body forms depending on personal caprice, or their rented non-sentient robot bodies they are ported into, arrive. They now all work and live on Sask-E in most of its cities and farms along with a lot of sentient creatures and robots. Even earthworms have been given sentience.
Gentle reader, sentient earthworms could have been fun! But no. They aren’t given much to do in this novel.
The planet is considered a private entity since everyone and everything, at least those not from free Spider City, belongs to private enterprises. Each city is a separate competitor of the other cities similar to the city-states of the ancient Greeks, except governance is done by competing corporate interests.
By the third part, lower-class citizens in many of the cities, and everyone from Spider City, are seething because of the stranglehold on the planet by the corporations. Eventually, the elites begin evicting the less fortunate from their homes. The controlling corporations want to tear down the older communities of servants and workers and build more elite residential towers. Tent towns, which became necessary as a result, are being attacked and razed. Spider City is also being threatened from losing its status as free. A corporation wants to wipe it out and build a transport service where Spider City used to be.
Can Moose the journalist cat and Scrubjay the train stop the corporations, especially the rapacious robot human Cylindra, owner of the city Emerald?
This novel had a lot of possible joy in it, but I couldn’t find much beyond reading about amazing biological/mechanical critters. They have PG-16 sex! One scene. There is that….
It is a lot of fun to go to creative future-world expo’s where creative scientists and writers imagine how technology can change the world! I have to admit going to fairs are much more fun than reading this novel for me. So, I am going on a sideways tour in my review, which has become necessarily about showing creative inventions about the future of science-based technology. Just because. Bite me.
My hometown of Seattle had a World’s Fair in 1962. It was fascinating to see the future world exposition that predominated in this fair. I was a little girl, but possibly going to Seattle’s fair is why science fiction is my favorite genre (mysteries are my second favorite, probably because of my childhood - another story).
The Seattle fair was full of possible future inventions and designs for the home, work, and outer space. One of its developments, the Space Needle, is still standing. It has become an iconic landmark. But it has been remodeled, and some of its original use by ordinary middle-class folk was lost, like free admittance. I remember the excitement of eating in the restaurant at the top, 620 feet up, which was on a turntable mechanism.
Almost all of the exhibits, like the Space Needle, have been completely redone into something else. The Bubbleater, a real wonder to me at age 7, is probably in pieces in a garbage dump. Still, if done right, imagining the future can be done in an exciting manner whether one is reading a novel or attending a fair!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century...
The Century 21 Exposition (also known as the Seattle World's Fair) was a world's fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair.
As planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works; some credit it with revitalizing Seattle's economic and cultural life (see History of Seattle since 1940). The fair saw the construction of the Space Needle and Alweg monorail, as well as several sports venues (Washington State Coliseum, now Climate Pledge Arena) and performing arts buildings (the Playhouse, now the Cornish Playhouse), most of which have since been replaced or heavily remodeled. Unlike some other world's fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit.
The site, slightly expanded since the fair, is now called Seattle Center; the United States Science Pavilion is now the Pacific Science Center. Another notable Seattle Center building, the Museum of Pop Culture (earlier called EMP Museum), was built nearly 40 years later and designed to fit in with the fairground atmosphere.
With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".
The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s. Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology.[6] In contrast, 12 years later—even in far more conservative Spokane, Washington—Expo '74 took environmentalism as its central theme. The theme of Spokane's Expo '74 was "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment.".
The grounds of the fair were divided into:
World of Science
World of Century 21 (also known as World of Tomorrow)
World of Commerce and Industry
World of Art
World of Entertainment
Show Street
Gayway
Boulevards of the World
Exhibit Fair
Food and Favors
Food Circus
World of Century 21
The Washington State Coliseum, financed by the state of Washington, was one of Thiry's own architectural contributions to the fairgrounds. His original conception had been staging the entire fair under a single giant air-conditioned tent-like structure, "a city of its own", but there were neither the budgets nor the tight agreements on concept to realize that vision. In the end, he got exactly enough of a budget to design and build a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) building suitable to hold a variety of exhibition spaces and equally suitable for later conversion to a sports arena and convention facility.
Pavilion of Electric Power
During the festival, the building hosted several exhibits. Nearly half of its surface area was occupied by the state's own circular exhibit "Century 21—The Threshold and the Threat", also known as the "World of Tomorrow" exhibit, billed as a "21-minute tour of the future". The building also housed exhibits by France, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), General Motors (GM), the American Library Association (ALA), and RCA, as well as a Washington state tourist center.
In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe.
Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night. The next cluster of cubes zoomed in on a vision of a high-tech, future home in a sylvan setting (and a commuter gyrocopter); a series of projections contrasted this "best of the future" to "the worst of the present" (over-uniform suburbs, a dreary urban housing project).
GM's Firebird III
The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway). There was also an "office of the future", a climate-controlled "farm factory", an automated offshore kelp and plankton harvesting farm, a vision of the schools of the future with "electronic storehouses of knowledge", and a vision of the many recreations that technology would free humans to pursue.
Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".
Under the same roof, the ALA exhibited a "library of the future" (centered on a Univac computer). GM exhibited its vision for highways and vehicles of the future (the latter including the Firebird III). Pan Am exhibited a giant globe that emphasized the notion that we had come to be able to think of distances between major world cities in hours and minutes rather than in terms of chancy voyages over great distances. RCA (which produced "The Threshold and the Threat") exhibited television, radio, and stereo technology, as well as its involvement in space. The French government had an exhibit with its own take on technological progress. Finally, a Washington state tourist center provided information for fair-goers wishing to tour the state.
I wish ‘The Terraformers’ had emphasized the sizzle of speculative science more, like the Seattle Fair.
September 8, 2023
Ambitious utopian book set on the planet Sask-E starting in the year 59006 and continuing to 60610. This is a story told in three separate parts. I particularly enjoyed the first part, featuring a Destry, a member of the Environmental Rescue Team. She is charged with terraforming Sask-E into a world similar to Earth, accompanied by her sidekick Whistle, a sentient moose. They discover a society that has existed for generations hidden in a volcano. The last two parts are each set hundreds of years later and feature different characters carrying on Destry’s legacy.
In this world, animals have developed the ability to think on par with humans and can communicate either through voice or mind-to-text. Artificial intelligence has evolved to the point of incorporation into a wide variety of lifeforms. Lifespans have increased to hundreds of years. The villain of the piece is the corporation, Verdance, the source of funding for the terraforming project which has enslaved the labor force.
Major themes include environmental protection, animal/human rights, social classes, personhood, the perils of capitalism, and corporate ethics (or lack thereof). I wish Destry had continued throughout the entire storyline, as she is the most well-developed of all the characters, but overall, I found it a stimulating and creative exploration of many issues relevant to our world.
In this world, animals have developed the ability to think on par with humans and can communicate either through voice or mind-to-text. Artificial intelligence has evolved to the point of incorporation into a wide variety of lifeforms. Lifespans have increased to hundreds of years. The villain of the piece is the corporation, Verdance, the source of funding for the terraforming project which has enslaved the labor force.
Major themes include environmental protection, animal/human rights, social classes, personhood, the perils of capitalism, and corporate ethics (or lack thereof). I wish Destry had continued throughout the entire storyline, as she is the most well-developed of all the characters, but overall, I found it a stimulating and creative exploration of many issues relevant to our world.
July 20, 2023
A flawed but worthwhile novel. It starts out well, with a short war as an early climax. Then a slow middle section, with long quotes from internal memos from one of the two corporate monsters in the book. This section had me wondering if I wanted to keep reading. Fortunately, the third section, with atrocities from the second and worse corporate monster, led to a hopeful ending.
As you can see nearby, other readers reactions are mixed: the current average rating is a bit over 3.4 stars. Which is just about my rating, and I'm undecided between rounding up or down. OK, I had enough reading fun to round up. Cautiously recommended. You may want to skim over some of the tedious middle section.
Here's Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review, which led me to read the book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
[porous paywall -- free acct. required]
Excerpt:
"The reader of Annalee Newitz’s third novel, “The Terraformers,” will surely walk away, stunned and bedazzled . . . This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours. The story — which begins nearly 60,000 years in the future and unfolds over more than a millennium — rollicks along at a brisk clip while allowing
allowing Newitz space to dig into characters and milieu, and pile on startling speculative elements."
As you can see nearby, other readers reactions are mixed: the current average rating is a bit over 3.4 stars. Which is just about my rating, and I'm undecided between rounding up or down. OK, I had enough reading fun to round up. Cautiously recommended. You may want to skim over some of the tedious middle section.
Here's Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review, which led me to read the book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
[porous paywall -- free acct. required]
Excerpt:
"The reader of Annalee Newitz’s third novel, “The Terraformers,” will surely walk away, stunned and bedazzled . . . This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours. The story — which begins nearly 60,000 years in the future and unfolds over more than a millennium — rollicks along at a brisk clip while allowing
allowing Newitz space to dig into characters and milieu, and pile on startling speculative elements."
October 28, 2023
It might be more like a 3 but I was completely disinterested at the end. There were some great concepts but this read more like a "how to" interact with LGBTQ+++
The first part was good-ish and I was getting into the evil corporation vs little guy theme but the drama never quite took off. After that, although there were some interesting characterizations and discussion of cows being sapient I just never got attached to any characters.
The first part was good-ish and I was getting into the evil corporation vs little guy theme but the drama never quite took off. After that, although there were some interesting characterizations and discussion of cows being sapient I just never got attached to any characters.
dnf
February 12, 2024dnf @ 4% this is so boring like im sorry, i tried to get out of my comfort zone because i usually read space scifi and i just… didn’t love this idk
December 13, 2023
4.5/5 Stāsts ir par Sask-E planētas teraformēšanu, personām, kas to veic un viņu cīniņiem par izdzīvošanu ar kompāniju, kurai šīs personas un planēta pieder. Lieliska audiogrāmata, par to vien 1 zvaigzne pienākas. Novatoriska pasaule, dažbrīd jūtami pārāk tieši komentāri par neveiksmīgo pilsētbūvniecību un sabiedriskā transporta tīkla plānošanu ASV. Bet grāmata ir visai interesanta, sākot ar intelektuāliem kaķiem, tārpiem, lavā peldošiem robotiem un beidzot ar pašregulējošiem vilcieniem. Cilvēks šeit ir tik ārpusmodes, ka principā nav sastopams.
![description](https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0246803/800wm")
December 9, 2023
This was the most inoffensive almost kawaii look at genocide I've ever read. Which is a very uncomfortable thing to feel, but also, I'm not offended? I am in a cozy but atrocious recursive cycle.
CONTENT WARNING:
Things that were good:
-The terraforming. The actual "what do we have to do to prepare the planet for more life forms" part was neat.
-Animal buddies! Who DOESN'T want to be friends with a flying moose?!
-Feel good look at feel bad things. You at least won't be sad!
Things that I didn't like:
-How can you feel good about feel bad things? I don't know, man. I'm not sure I'm really interested in cozying up with extreme capitalism and slavery? The dissonance of just being alive in a world that relies on mega corporations is already a pretty precarious part of being a human. More was not really what I wanted.
-Illogical. Sigh. That's not how contracts work. That's not how real estate works, that's not how medical experimentation works etc. etc. etc. I get it, it's fun to make corporate overlords who "own" people, but in a world where real corporate overlords actually do own people, let's make it make sense, you know? Make it add up. Show me the work in worldbuilding that got us here. That actually goes for everything going on in this book, not just the slavery, although that's the yuckiest part.
-Really a collection of novellas. Which is fine, but it did feel like different books rather than episodes in the world. I found it disjointed.
I think perhaps the worst thing I can say about a book about huge social wrongs is that I felt nothing from it. And I think the nicest thing I can say about this book is that I have no ill feelings. So...it's okay.
CONTENT WARNING:
Things that were good:
-The terraforming. The actual "what do we have to do to prepare the planet for more life forms" part was neat.
-Animal buddies! Who DOESN'T want to be friends with a flying moose?!
-Feel good look at feel bad things. You at least won't be sad!
Things that I didn't like:
-How can you feel good about feel bad things? I don't know, man. I'm not sure I'm really interested in cozying up with extreme capitalism and slavery? The dissonance of just being alive in a world that relies on mega corporations is already a pretty precarious part of being a human. More was not really what I wanted.
-Illogical. Sigh. That's not how contracts work. That's not how real estate works, that's not how medical experimentation works etc. etc. etc. I get it, it's fun to make corporate overlords who "own" people, but in a world where real corporate overlords actually do own people, let's make it make sense, you know? Make it add up. Show me the work in worldbuilding that got us here. That actually goes for everything going on in this book, not just the slavery, although that's the yuckiest part.
-Really a collection of novellas. Which is fine, but it did feel like different books rather than episodes in the world. I found it disjointed.
I think perhaps the worst thing I can say about a book about huge social wrongs is that I felt nothing from it. And I think the nicest thing I can say about this book is that I have no ill feelings. So...it's okay.
November 8, 2022
In full honesty this was a DNF for me. The characters were incredibly flat to the point that the whole store felt stale. It was unreadable for lack of any real character depth or interest. The events of the novel felt almost manipulative because of how flat the characters were.
However the ideas here were fascinating. If you're looking for a novel with intensely interesting ideas and you can completely ignore the characters then I would recommend this. From the company that focuses on terraforming for profit to the point of creating their own persons to do it, to the ideas of personhood that raises and worth, it had some super interesting things.
However the ideas here were fascinating. If you're looking for a novel with intensely interesting ideas and you can completely ignore the characters then I would recommend this. From the company that focuses on terraforming for profit to the point of creating their own persons to do it, to the ideas of personhood that raises and worth, it had some super interesting things.
February 4, 2023
I don’t know, man. I loved Newitz’s non fiction, Four Lost Cities, but this lost the plot for me. Going so far in the future but being so clearly beholden to early 21st century Twitter-discourse-level ideology about urbanism, capitalism, gender, environmentalism. In its attempts to be utopian, it failed to actually conceive of a believable world with believable characters.
January 11, 2023
This review ran long, so to sum up: this book is challenging, extraordinarily creative, and very intelligently crafted. It’s not particularly “satisfying” per se - it’s too realistically messy for that - but it’s one of the more remarkable journeys I’ve ever been on.
The protagonists of this book are terraformers on a privately-held planet, working to turn a barren rock into a Pleistocene paradise ready to be sold off as valuable, virgin real estate. The conflict implied there is the conflict of the entire book. One cannot craft a functioning, balanced, sustainable ecosystem from nothing without a deep and abiding respect for the work one is doing. And yet the ones in charge do not have that same respect - they want a planet that looks good enough on brochures to turn a profit. Anything past that towards real sustainability goes against the bottom line.
The terraforming process takes thousands of years - though people can live that long in this book, if they’re wealthy and powerful enough. There are three sections to the story. The first is set at the end of the terraforming process, as the corporate overlords are starting to put the planet on the market. The second section takes place while the initial settlements are being constructed. The final part is when the cities have been built, and the corporations and residents are determining what society will look like.
All of this takes place about 60,000 years in the future. There are no aliens in this book, but “human” no longer means what it once did. What matters is whether or not someone is a person. They can be a cow or a train or a moose or a naked mole rat, if they are sentient, they are a person with rights. Or they would have rights, if they didn’t live on a privately-owned world where they were literally owned by the corporation that owns the planet and were created specifically to terraform the place.
As you can probably get from this review, this book has a lot going on. Questions of gender and personhood. Preserving the environment vs development. Capitalism. Planned obsolescence. The list goes on.
One I didn’t expect, but give Newitz full credit for not shying away from: dating and relationships. We’ve gotten used, to some degree (not as much as we should have, but better than we used to be) to saying that biology doesn’t matter. So long as everyone is a consenting adult, a romantic relationship is perfectly fine. How does that play out when a sentient tractor is interested in a sentient panda? The logical, rational, non-hypocritical answer is that it’s perfectly fine, but it was still strange to read about that sort of thing.
Not that prejudice doesn’t exist in this world. There is definitely a pro-homo sapiens bias in many ways, and that plays a large role in everything too.
Like I said, this book has a tremendous amount going on. The ultimate ending wasn’t what I would call “satisfying,” because this book was too faithful to telling a realistic story. (Within the science fiction conceptualization of things. You know what I mean.) You don’t get neat endings in real life with so many competing interests. But this was an utterly fascinating book to read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is up for a challenge.
My blog
The protagonists of this book are terraformers on a privately-held planet, working to turn a barren rock into a Pleistocene paradise ready to be sold off as valuable, virgin real estate. The conflict implied there is the conflict of the entire book. One cannot craft a functioning, balanced, sustainable ecosystem from nothing without a deep and abiding respect for the work one is doing. And yet the ones in charge do not have that same respect - they want a planet that looks good enough on brochures to turn a profit. Anything past that towards real sustainability goes against the bottom line.
The terraforming process takes thousands of years - though people can live that long in this book, if they’re wealthy and powerful enough. There are three sections to the story. The first is set at the end of the terraforming process, as the corporate overlords are starting to put the planet on the market. The second section takes place while the initial settlements are being constructed. The final part is when the cities have been built, and the corporations and residents are determining what society will look like.
All of this takes place about 60,000 years in the future. There are no aliens in this book, but “human” no longer means what it once did. What matters is whether or not someone is a person. They can be a cow or a train or a moose or a naked mole rat, if they are sentient, they are a person with rights. Or they would have rights, if they didn’t live on a privately-owned world where they were literally owned by the corporation that owns the planet and were created specifically to terraform the place.
As you can probably get from this review, this book has a lot going on. Questions of gender and personhood. Preserving the environment vs development. Capitalism. Planned obsolescence. The list goes on.
One I didn’t expect, but give Newitz full credit for not shying away from: dating and relationships. We’ve gotten used, to some degree (not as much as we should have, but better than we used to be) to saying that biology doesn’t matter. So long as everyone is a consenting adult, a romantic relationship is perfectly fine. How does that play out when a sentient tractor is interested in a sentient panda? The logical, rational, non-hypocritical answer is that it’s perfectly fine, but it was still strange to read about that sort of thing.
Not that prejudice doesn’t exist in this world. There is definitely a pro-homo sapiens bias in many ways, and that plays a large role in everything too.
Like I said, this book has a tremendous amount going on. The ultimate ending wasn’t what I would call “satisfying,” because this book was too faithful to telling a realistic story. (Within the science fiction conceptualization of things. You know what I mean.) You don’t get neat endings in real life with so many competing interests. But this was an utterly fascinating book to read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is up for a challenge.
My blog
March 16, 2023
Full review
The blurbs! The blurbs are amazing for this book. But the narrative is so boring. And there are so many exclamation points, friend! And so many characters say, friend!
People bioengineered to terraform a planet? Sounds cool. A mix between robots and animal cyborgs? Go on. A sustainable future after a disaster? I’m interested. Monotonous conversations about the need to organize? Um, you’re losing me. Killing off main characters and jumping ahead thousands of years? Now, I’m losing the sense of continuity and need to start over. More, incredibly boring conversations about organizing? I think I’ll scroll Elizabeth Warren’s instagram feed instead.
I forced myself to finish this book. The action is thin. The characters repetitive. It seemed like an editor should have circled scenes and asked how does this move the story forward? And, are these the most interesting perspectives? It’s Occupy Wall Street meets Becky Chambers with motivations so naked nothing is left to the reader’s imagination.
The blurbs! The blurbs are amazing for this book. But the narrative is so boring. And there are so many exclamation points, friend! And so many characters say, friend!
People bioengineered to terraform a planet? Sounds cool. A mix between robots and animal cyborgs? Go on. A sustainable future after a disaster? I’m interested. Monotonous conversations about the need to organize? Um, you’re losing me. Killing off main characters and jumping ahead thousands of years? Now, I’m losing the sense of continuity and need to start over. More, incredibly boring conversations about organizing? I think I’ll scroll Elizabeth Warren’s instagram feed instead.
I forced myself to finish this book. The action is thin. The characters repetitive. It seemed like an editor should have circled scenes and asked how does this move the story forward? And, are these the most interesting perspectives? It’s Occupy Wall Street meets Becky Chambers with motivations so naked nothing is left to the reader’s imagination.
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