Review: The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz

Review: The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz

by Rich Horton

The Terraformers is an endlessly fascinating, deeply thoughtful, provocative hard SF novel set in the deep future, some 60,000 years from now. It interrogates or speculates on intelligence, governance, animal rights (and the definition of animal!), public transit, and of course the process of terraforming. It's also a sometimes frustrating novel, with a rather broken-backed plot (partly for good reasons), with plenty of built-in assumptions that invite argument, and with an ending that approaches deus ex machina. So what did I think over all? Gosh -- you should read it, is what I think! It's never less than interesting, and if you can't argue with an SF novel's assumptions, then what are you reading SF for, I wonder?

It opens on the planet Sask-E, as Destry, a ranger for the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT) investigates a fire in the boreal forest that she is trying to maintain. This fire, we learn, has been set by a Homo Sapiens, who is roasting a captured animal while squatting on what should still be virgin and developing forest. Bad enough -- but eating an animal? Truly awful! Destry ejects him, and then finds herself in trouble with her boss, Ronnie, an executive with the corporation, Verdance, that is developing the planet. Their goal is to have a (quasi-)pristine Pleistocene planet, for which Homo Sapiens will pay plenty to live in. And the interloper that Destry sent off is a son of one of their major investors. 

There's a lot to unpack there. We are in the year 59,006, relative to when I don't know for sure, though I suspect it's relative to the Farm Revolution and the establishment of the "Great Bargain" -- when Homo Sapiens on an ecologically ruined Earth struck a bargain with animals they had, in some sense, "uplifted". Since that time Earth-based intelligences -- "people" is the appropriate term -- are all enhanced by what I take to be electronic means, enhanced in intelligence (define it how you may) and in longevity (with some other capabilities too.) People live centuries. People include Homo Sapiens, Homo Diversus (the dominant strain, I gather -- physically modified in various ways, sometimes including wings), and Homo Archaea (a Neanderthal variety), and also various animals: cats, cows, moose, many more; and also machine intelligences -- and these categories can mix. Destry herself has a companion, a flying moose named Whistle, who has a low "In Ass" rating -- because his vocabulary is small. As such he is technically a "Mount", but Destry takes care to treat him as another person. Soon we learn that Verdance owns the whole planet, and ALSO owns all the people, whom they have decanted themselves. (Lots of questions there about slavery, and the nature and measurement of intelligence, and also manipulation of such.)

Things take a turn when Destry discovers that a volcano on Sask-E, Spider, shelters a large colony of Homo Archaea -- the original workers for Verdance, who could breath the first atmosphere but have trouble with the higher oxygen content now present. They were supposed to die off when the atmosphere shifted -- instead, they retreated into the volcano, and have survived for a millennium. Destry and Whistle and other ERT friends get involved in a sort of rebellion, when the people of Spider resist Verdance's diversion of a river which had supplied the Spider City the water they need -- and Destry and company help them resist, and eventually negotiate a treaty, guaranteeing Spider's independence in exchange for a couple of months of labor a year from each resident.

Then the action jumps a few hundred years. We follow a team of ERT workers, led by a Spider City resident named Sulfur, plus the now deceased Destry's successor, a man named Mischa, as they try to set up an environmentally friendly mass transit system between all the new or planned cities. Much of this concerns Ronnie's obsession with what she knows will be obsolescent trains; and the distrust between Sulfur and Mischa, the latter who, like Destry, works for Verdance. Also involved is Cylindra, a former Verdance employee now leading the efforts of another corporation, Emerald, which has bought a great deal of real estate on Sask-E. Somewhat fortuitously, they are able to play off Cylindra's and Ronnie's mutual antagonism to drive through a better transit system, using newly decanted intelligent flying trains.

The third section jumps forward another few hundred years. Sask-E is largely populated by corporate-owned cities, with Emerald the dominant force. Spider City is still independent. And the intelligent trains are a significant force. The primary viewpoint character is Scrubjay, the first train, nurtured by Sulfur and Mischa. Scrubjay finds a sort of squatter on their train one day -- a cat and a journalist, left homeless by rapacious housing policies, plus a lot of pro-Homo Sapiens racism -- as the planet was designed to mimic the Pleistocene in which H. Sapiens evolved, some people want it to be an H. Sapiens-only planet. These tensions soon come to a head in Emerald City, as that corporation, and its maximally evil (she'd be twirling a mustache if she had one) leader, Cylindra, are evicting non-H. Sapiens, violently resisting protests (to the point of space laser attacks on city blocks) and doing countless other evil things. The intelligent trains get involved in the humanitarian job of rescuing refugees, and they realize that the only way to counter Emerald's scheming is to have Sask-E declared a public planet, which will only work if they can prove that there are non-corporate, legal, governing bodies ... Meanwhile, Scrubjay's new friend, the journalist cat named Moose (in honor, apparently, of Whistle) is investigating, gathering evidence of the misdeeds of Emerald ...

I've left a lot out, and that's OK -- it will be a delight for you to read about all those other fun things. Annalee Newitz is one of those writers with a particularly high ratio of ideas to pages. This book is simply overflowing with cool speculation, interesting political discussion, wild and implausible but fun concepts, and neat characters. As I suggested above, though, it's not perfect. The tripartite structure, with major characters completely abandoned at each new section, makes sense, but still is at some level dissatisfying. The one idea that seems underexplored is longevity -- these characters, living centuries or millennia, don't give off any sense of being that old. The book is an argument for governments, at one level -- and that's a good argument to make, but in setting up corporations as unredeemably evil it overplays its hand. (The corporate villains, especially Cylindra, are just too over the top, and in fact much of the nasty stuff they get up to is stuff we see right now -- from governments.) The resolution depends on a lot of coincidence, a lot of luck, and a lot of utter stupidity on the part of the bad people. There are ethical questions left unaddressed (the "uplifted" animals don't seem to have been asked permission, for one thing), and people sure seem to take a long time to realize that almost everyone on Sask-E is enslaved. (I mean, they know this, and complain some times, but they never (until, maybe, right at the end) seem to think "Well, the basic problem here is that people are literally owned, so maybe that is what should stop FIRST.") Some of the science is awfully rubbery, but that's been par for the course for "hard" science fiction (as I'd call this) forever.

I seem to be complaining a lot, but really these are, if not nits, elements that are well worth putting up for in exchange for the cool ideas, the intriguing plot and characters, and the ethical questions that ARE raised, and are very much worth thinking about. I highly recommend this novel, zits and all.

One more minor note -- I "read" this by listening to it. The narrator is Emily Lawrence, and she does a fine job -- but -- (I keep having buts!) -- but, the producers try something unusual. A lot of the characters -- the AIs, mainly -- emit sound effects. Newitz' prose describes these well enough, but the audiobook attempts to reproduce the sound effects, and I found that extremely distracting. (And sometimes annoying, as when the text calls for something like "lively music" and the sound effects don't really seem to fit -- made me think of the subtitles on TV shows like Stranger Things, which became almost a joke when they described the background music and stuff.) Some of the characters' voices were (it seemed to me) electronically processed -- and this too is something I found bothersome. That all may well be just me, though -- other people might find it really cool. (And the presentation of the trains' singing, towards the end, was really pretty effective, I will say.)