SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

 

The Terraformers is Annalee Newitz's third novel and is now a Nebula finalist for best novel. Newitz was once known for being the creator and editor-in-chief of io9 and has written a pair of interesting speculative novels - Autonomous (itself a Nebula finalist) and The Future of Another Timeline - both of which deal with ideas taken from today's world extrapolated to a speculative future (as does most sci-fi, but Newitz plays with these ideas as her forefront more than she necessarily does characters). The Terraformers is similar in that regard as it deals with Colonization and changing of lands to fit certain people's ideals in the far future and deals with the struggle for public and private control of such a world and the people contained within.

It's a novel set in three time periods, each 700 years from each other, as events on the planet Sask-E shift due to people's actions in each time period, with new central protagonists (with relations to the prior protagonists) in each act. And it works kind of well to tell an interesting sci-fi story dealing heavily with themes of colonization, of what it means to be a person and who gets to choose such, of indentured servitude to corporations, and of political and other means of rising up for a people's or a planet's rights in the face of corporate or colonizing greed. Things wind up working perhaps a bit too easily really and there's some plot elements that recur at times to the point of it being a little repetitive (as well as some shallow characters owing to the setup), but it's certainly a very interesting book - one whose Nebula nomination makes sense, even if I wouldn't pick it to win.


Plot Summary:  

The Planet Sask-E is supposed to be a private planet owned by the corporate entity Verdance and managed by its executive Ronnie for the purpose of terraforming a planet to appeal to a certain type of investors: those who are interested in living in a body - a kid of H. Sapiens body that is unique to Verdance - in a land built to resemble Earth's ancient past. But Ronnie has delegated much of the terraforming process to a team of Environmental Rescue Team ("ERT") Rangers, whose mission is to ensure that the developing planet's eco-system remains in balance. Destry is one of those Rangers and, despite the limitations Ronnie has placed upon her, she is determined to fight for the sake of the planet, its inhabitants, and the people she cares about to do her mission. And so when she discovers an ancient people who have liberated themselves from Verdance and created a more egalitarian society - where all creatures are considered people and none limited to just being mounts and tools - Destry takes an action to protect them that will make Sask-E like no other private planet before...with repercussions far beyond what she can imagine.

Centuries later, Destry's successors will have to deal with the ramifications of her actions as Verdance and another corporate entity try to enforce their greedy visions upon the planet at the cost of the growing and strange communities of people that have settled there...and these successors will have to find a way to fight back to assert their own rights to exist on the world they have been responsible for growing....

The Terraformers features a far future where future technology has resulted in biological and other tech far beyond our own world in some interesting and some not really explained ways.  One key component of its world is that people in this universe aren't born (there's no natural birth I think at all in the book) but are instead created by machines and decanted in various forms.  Some model themselves after modern homo sapiens (H. Sapiens), others after older forms of humanity, and others after more functional modifications to humanity so that their bodies can work for alternate purposes.  People can also create extra bodies to remote into to live in other forms.  In a particularly notable shift, the technology allows for people to create sentient beings who live in bodies we think of as belonging to animals - dogs, cats, moose, etc. - all of whom are fully sentient, although the corporate entities that creates such beings may install limiting devices to reduce such beings to the status of being a mount or even lower, a tool called "blessed" unable to talk about something that isn't their primary purpose/role.  

The book uses this setup and technology to create a story about what it means to be a person and how colonization can truly occur, with prejudices and people's rights often being run roughshod over by corporations.  In the book's first act, we see Destry and her allies try to save a group of beings from an older considered obsolete human form, who got away somehow from Verdance and built a city under a mountain, from Verdance's potential extermination...as these people shouldn't exist per Verdance and try to promote equality of beings regardless of their form or use and thus are far from Verdance's ideas of people created for various purposes and then discarded.  In the second act we see now how the corporations attempt to abuse these tools and try to use a purposely poor idea of mass transit to scuttle the idea of it since it will hinder their ability to control their private cities by providing freedom of movement.  In the final act, we see the private corporations try to gentrify and push out those they don't seem desirable from the homes they built and the protagonists need to band together to find a way to fight back that doesn't destroy everything.

As you can see the story uses its setup to work really well with its ideas of the evils of colonization and capitalist/corporate greed and its ideas of every person being entitled to their own lives and choices.  It's a hopeful story in how it ends and repeatedly features characters from different places in society finding love, even as they fight against some truly ugly enemies.  And the story certainly reads very well and can go in some unexpected directions at times, so it never drags.  It's effective in these ways and the future it portrays is really interesting and vivid in both the goods and evils it portrays.    

That said, there are some flaws which prevent this from being a huge winner.  As with many generational stories - like generation ship stories ,which this kind of resembles - the jumps in time between the acts mean that we need to restart learning new characters every act, and the main characters never really get that deep in characterization.  They're fine enough, but it makes them feel a little rote, especially when acts 2 and 3 feature similar love stories between two of their major characters such that it just feels like the same thing is going over and over again.  There's also one debate late in act 2 about whether people whose bodies are built for a single purpose are likely to act in that purpose...the story comes down on the side of "they won't be forced to but most people will want to do what they're best at" which doesn't quite seem right to me (and one character even questions it only for his question to come to naught whatsoever).  

But overall, this is certainly some interesting idea-based fiction dealing with anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist ideas in a very different far future.  Worth a read, and understandably a nebula finalist, although I'd be surprised if it got much Hugo love.