TBR Pile Review: The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz

Blurb

The Terraformers is an equally heart-warming and thought-provoking vision of the future for fans of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Martha Wells.

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.

My Review

This is two stories that follow on from each other, taking place several thousand years apart, containing some of the same characters. The characters are a variety of species and genders.

The character pairs of Destry and Moose, Sulfur and Misha, Moose and Scrubjay, are memorable and loving in their own way. They are biological or mechanical, hominins or other species, all with sentience. They interact with each other, form families and are torn between doing the right thing and being controlled by Verdance or Emerald. Scrubjay and Moose are particularly interesting. Scrubjay is a sentient flying train, Moose is a sentient cat. They fall in love with each other while taking on and taking down Emerald, the corporation that has taken control of Sask-E and who are trying to destroy Spider City.

The main theme of the story is that companies controlling life is a bad idea. That better ways of governing and building communities are possible, but there will always be forces intent on breaking those better ways for their own profit.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the environments of Sask-E and the social structures. They are clearly thought out and based on a lot of research.

Newitz is a clear and amusing writer. I have read (listened to) their non-fiction book, Four Lost Cities, and to be fair I also follow Annalee Newitz on Instagram. I listen to their Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. It’s a sci-fi and fantasy podcast Annalee Newitz does with Charlie Jane Anders.

Highly recommended.