The Terraformers

by Annalee Newitz

Paperback, 2023

Status

Available

Call number

813.6

Genres

Collection

Alternate Worlds

Publication

Orbit (2023), 368 pages

Description

Destry's life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her. But the bright, clean future they're building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn't exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she's devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E's future for generations to come.

User reviews

LibraryThing member James_Knupp

I really, really wanted to like this a lot more. Annalee Newitz creates so many fascinating concepts, and raises tons of deep ethical questions. But the pacing of this story feels wildly off. The first third is a RAPID escalation. You barely get introduced to the setting before some key things

about get upended. There's massive conflict right away that almost immediately gets resolved. The middle third is slow and more exploratory and gives you more opportunity to learn about the world, but its more of a romance plot. Then the final third again has rapid escalation with very quick resolution. Each section on its own were paced fine, but as a 3 part story it just did not mesh for me.

My other issue is there are so many cool creatures/beings introduced, but it might be too many. The characters outside of a few all feel very one dimensional in that they're either good or comically evil. It didn't feel like they got enough nuance.

I'm glad I read this still as I enjoyed many parts of it and I think it brought up a lot of concepts and world building I might not have encountered otherwise, but it just wasn't quite what I wanted.

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13 more

LibraryThing member booklove2

An alert to all sci-fi fans! This is a must-read for you! I may have read my very favorite book for the year 2023 FIRST. oh no! This also might be so good that it has ruined all future and past sci-fi books for me! oh no! I was captivated by the first page, jumping into the year 59,006 on the

planet Sask-E with a terraforming ranger named Destry in the Environmental Rescue Team. This book! An insane amount of imagination, rich in detail like a terraformed forest and it branches to other areas from there. Wow - so imaginative and so complex with all of these ideas but so accessible. I think I may have taken more notes while reading this book than with any other book I have ever read. I really liked the first chapter of the book focusing on a lone environmental ranger in a terraformed forest, their job: making sure carbon was balanced. (Note: I am partial to books with lots of solitude... also evolutionary and/or nature sci-fi.) I was hoping it would stick with this crazy futuristic eco-science or even focus much more on the futuristic parable about indigenous people. But this is my wishes for a book I did not write - instead, the book branches into a vast cast of characters that could look like the Star Wars cantina and how they vie for person-hood. To be fair, this book is so imaginative that there are many directions it could have went in, especially as the narrative jumps over 1,600 years. Obviously many things will change over a plot of that scope. And with so many possible details, it might get difficult to please every reader. Some of the things in this book can be a bit goofy at times, one example: scientist naked mole rats, but all the characters beg to be embraced, vying for agency and a chance in a complicated future. I can SAY it's "goofy", but it's goofy for Earth in the year 2023... who knows what might be going on if anyone is around to see the year 59,000... not to mention if it isn't an Earth based reality. Newitz seems to cherry pick some of the best details in some of the biggest sci-fi projects, which I will not name here, both to not set up expectations, but also allow 'The Terraformers' to be fully its own thing, which it deserves. I also don't want to ruin surprises along the way, so I'll let each reader make their own connections. I often say speculative fiction doesn't have enough detail for me, but this one FINALLY delivers. My brain has expanded with this one. I hope Annalee Newitz keeps writing these hyper imaginative books, because I will want to read them. Don't miss this one!

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LibraryThing member Bodagirl

The world building requires more attention than I can give an audio book right now. Love the concept of other sentient beings and the melding of technology with biology. I might try again at a different time or with a different format.

LibraryThing member JanaRose1

The book is a lifecycle of the planet Sask-E and it's terraforming and development. The first part focused on Destry, a member of the Environmental Rescue Team. Their goal, to maintain the balance of the eco-system. When a lava flow uncovers a hidden door, Destry and her team discover a city of

people, the original terraformers who were supposed to die out. The second part of the book focuses on creating a public transit system to connect the planet. The third part of the book focuses on thwarting the private owners, who are determined to take over the planet for themselves.

I thought this was a well written and well developed world. My only criticism is that this felt like 3 different book. I really wanted to know more details about what happened to the characters in the previous parts. Instead, the author left their fates a bit vague. Despite this criticism, highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member Shrike58

File under: Interesting, but just interesting. Newitz has apparently wanted to write a planetary epic for awhile, that resulted in this book, which is her version of utopia. This is fine as far as it goes, but what she mostly wound up with is a polemic, and this doesn't make for that successful of

a novel; though the first segment would have made a fine free-standing novella. In a way, that makes this a rather "old school" piece of science fiction, in that the ideas are more important than the characters.

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LibraryThing member xevooy

Underwhelming and overlong.

LibraryThing member psalva

On their podcast, Newitz says that the two things that make a planet believable in sci-fi are diverse environments and a believable history. Needless to say, this book has both! I found it to be such a well-thought exploration of how people interact with a planet and each other. Great characters

also! It does what great sci-fi should which is to immerse the reader in a world so they can imagine what is possible. Thought provoking and beautiful!
The other noteworthy thing about this is it’s not a utopia- in a way I found this to be more hopeful than if it had been. It shows the beauty of people (in all forms and presentations) working together and through challenging situations and not giving up hope for improving everyone’s lives.

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LibraryThing member macha

this book about a possible far future touches on a dizzying array of concepts, moving from terraforming to corporatocracy, from limited autonomy to transhumanism, but don't let that stop you, because it's really about the joy of remaking the world for the benefit of everyone (not limited to

humankind) in it, and so it peoples this cosmos with an interesting cast of characters notable for their imagination and interests in testing the limits of everything. surprisingly, all this range does not result in a daunting read; it's a fun book, and you can feel the enthusiasm of the writer who made it, creating the point of view of, for instance, flying trains - or engineer naked mole rats - along the way. i can't decide if it's just a little too long, or a little too short to incorporate a firmer finish line, and it's a bit uneven in tone, some places, but the wonder of it really is that it mostly works pretty seamlessly considering all the ground it covers. everyone should be reading this author, who in this generation is not afraid of overreaching, and always has important things to say while managing to be entertaining, so the narratives flow in coherent though sometimes radically unexpected directions.

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LibraryThing member capewood

Book #14. 2023. The history of terraforming a planet to make it Earth-like. More like a series of short stories covering the past 1,000 years of so. Good world building but I had a hard time relating to the characters and ultimately didn't really like it.

LibraryThing member Guide2

Some interesting ideas, but many of the decisions made by the characters, mostly the villains, don't really make a lot of sense that it detracts from the story.

LibraryThing member lorax

I should have liked this book more than I did. Planetary engineering, terraforming, uplifted animals of all sorts, evil corporations - it has all the right ingredients. However the second section (the book is structured as three loosely connected sections, sharing plot themes and setting but not

characters) dragged tremendously and was overly didactic - I never quite bought the idea that somehow in a future where everything from earthworms on up can be engineered to be intelligent, wild animals with animal-level intelligence were okay but domestic animals with the same were a horror on par with lobotomizing babies. (For that matter I didn't really buy the intelligent earthworms, either. Maybe stick with vertebrates and cephalopods.) The book picked up again in the third section, but not enough to bring it to the level I'd hoped.

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LibraryThing member SChant

I really wanted to like this book but it just didn't work for me. The author has obviously done some research into biodiversity, ecology and geology, but just doesn't seem to have thought the science through properly and instead flung it all into a big, unconvincing stew. Plus, the economics of a

megacorp running a multi-thousand year project to terraform a planet for profit 60,000 years later doesn't ring true.
The first section is OK, with some world-building and a bit of decent charaterisation, but the remaining 2/3 are a flurry of random names, actions and events that lack coherence or interest.

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LibraryThing member lavaturtle

There are a whole lot of ideas in this book -- about what it takes to protect an ecosystem, about who gets to be a person, about the assumptions we tend to make about language and intelligence, about how to structure a society, about collective decision-making, about what is and isn't considered a

reasonable plan of action. I really liked the worldbuilding, with the various people (only some of whom were human or even biological), the ERT, the sensor networks... and the subversion of modern assumptions about biological gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Also the stuff about language and intelligence, and what kind of society would limit people's communication ability just to lock them into a particular kind of work.

Unfortunately I found the giant time jumps pretty jarring. Just when I'd get really invested in a set of characters, we're hundreds of years in the future and most of them aren't around anymore. I do like that we got to see the long-term consequences of some of the decisions that were made. But I feel like we broke away from Destry's story, or Misha's, while there was still a lot left to tell. Also, the ending felt a bit rushed -- as soon as some old corporate secrets came out, things were basically solved, and also this magically caused a different corporation to generously reverse gentrification?

That said, there's still a lot I liked here. The sentient flying trains! The Tongue Forks! The way Chef subverted her language limiter by moving to Tooth! Everything about Spider City!

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LibraryThing member monkity

Newitz ambitiously shows how far in the future, if we survive the many crises ahead, we might still be able to build not just worlds like Earth, but communities of engineered species and intelligences, and overcome odds set by corporations and social contracts stacked against liberty. That's a tall

ambition, and she mostly nails it.

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