The Terraformers
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3.7 • 63 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration of the future.
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.
A science fiction epic for our times and a love letter to our future, The Terraformers will take you on a journey spanning thousands of years and exploring the triumphs, strife, and hope that find us wherever we make our home.
"Brilliantly thoughtful, prescient, and gripping.”—Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries
Also by Annalee Newitz
Autonomous
The Future of Another Timeline
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newitz (The Future of Another Timeline) performs a staggering feat of revolutionary imagination in this hopeful space-opera built from three interconnected novellas. "Settlers" opens on Destry Thomas, a ranger with the Environmental Rescue Team on corporate-owned planet Sasky, as she stumbles on a fiercely independent underground society, Spider City. Discovery puts Spider City at risk, while showing Sasky's surface-dwellers a new possible future. In "Public Works," a crew of bots and hominins grows from uneasy colleagues to found family while trying to design a planetwide public transport network. They're undermined at every step by their corporate overlords, until they reach Spider City, where every being is a person, and a radical new solution presents itself. "Gentrifiers" sees a planetwide housing crisis bring together a sentient train, Scrubjay, and Moose, a cat journalist. As unrest erupts across Sasky's big cities, Scrubjay and Moose race to lend aid, in the process uncovering a shocking secret that could be key to breaking the corporate stranglehold over the planet. Newitz masterfully grapples with questions of embodiment and personhood, exploring the power of coalition and the impossibility of utopia under capitalism. With the ethos of Becky Chambers and the gonzo imagination of Samuel R. Delany, plus a strong scientific basis in ecology and urban planning, this feels like a new frontier in science fiction.
Customer Reviews
Far Future Mind Blowing Tale on a Planetary Scale
“The Terraformers” is the latest novel by Annalee Newitz, and might be their most ambitious work to date. It’s set in the far future, the year 59,006 to be exact, and occurs on the planet Sask-E. This planet is owned by a corporation that is terraforming it to be analogous to the earth during the Pleistocene Epoch. The scope of this book is also long term, covering generations of far future beings that last for many centuries (or sometimes much longer in the case of bots).
Our introduction to the planet is via an Environmental Rescue Team (ERT) Ranger named Destry and the moose Whistle. They are the main characters for the first portion of the book which takes us up to the period where off-world investors begin the serious settlement of the planet. Then we have a forward time jump and our lead character becomes Sulfur, an engineered hominid based more on Neanderthal DNA. Sulfur eventually surrenders the stage to Scrubjay, who is a sentient non-human construct.
This story structure allows the reader to follow events on Sask-E as the terraforming and settlement progress over long periods of time. It’s an amazing story involving many types of human and nonhuman intelligences that are all part of the “Great Bargain.” This ancient compact which began on legendary Earth involves the uplift of animals to intelligence, as well as non-human intelligences such as bots and other sentient machines.
This setting allows a serious exploration of what constitutes personhood, as well as the age-old story of colonialism, and racism/speciesism. The corporations and some individuals involved behave in ways we expect. Others seek to help their fellow beings and establish common good. The outcome of these actions will determine the future of this new world.
I think Annalee has written another deeply thoughtful and interesting story. It’s alternately depressing and hopeful, but ends in a better place than it begins. I think it’s a very different novel, and one that is a great exploration of the far future.
An ending as bad as its beginning….
This book was so bad. It starts off like a knock off of avatar with someone communicating with the planet. Three sections later, you have animals for coating with robots and sentient trains. It took me months to read. It was awful.