![]() Siobhan Adcock is a writer and editor whose most recent novel is The Completionist.Ī cinematic tour of ambition, greed and desperation in biotech Red and white blood cells from a leukemia patient. ![]() If we’re ever going to save ourselves from ourselves, then maybe what we need is a new way of thinking about self. ![]() Newitz’s mordant sense of humor steers the story clear of starry-eyed optimism, but it’s easy to imagine future generations studying this novel as a primer for how to embrace solutions to the challenges we all face. The Terraformers, refreshingly, is the opposite of the dystopian, we’re-all-doomed chiller that’s become so common in climate fiction. As one character remarks, “Where there’s desire, there’s data.”)Īs messy as all this sounds, it opens up thrilling new pathways of hope that Earth 2.0 might succeed. (If you’ve ever wanted to know how a sentient train can couple with a robot or a cat, your answer is here. Once the assumption that only humans are people is swept away, thorny questions of natural resource allocation, representative government, inclusive language and sexual freedom are up for reevaluation. And thanks to a galactic accord known as the Great Bargain, they all have a valid seat at the negotiating table. Animals, robots, hybrids, and even doors and worms are in communication with the humans of the future. On Sask-E, however, technology has made possible an entirely new definition of personhood. The same technological innovations that push a civilization to new heights of achievement can also be complicit in that civilization’s undoing. Each character plays a part in answering whether well-intentioned people can save the best parts of Sask-E from the worst depredations of runaway consumer culture fostered by slimy corporate interests and lazy government.Īs the story of Sask-E’s rise, ruin and slow road to redemption unfolds over thousands of years, Newitz’s attention is on the complex symbiotic relation between technologies and cultures, another classic trope of science fiction that they also explored in their 2021 nonfiction book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. If the antagonists in Newitz’s novel are thinly outlined, it is perhaps because the novel’s big “what if?” demands some fairly broad strokes. Newitz’s plot skips across generations of people who come after Destry-an appealingly diverse cast of rangers, scientists, engineers and an utterly endearing autonomous collective of sentient flying trains. Terraforming is a slow process after all, and readers who get invested in Destry’s character might be saddened to learn that this isn’t really her story. The discovery of an underground civilization on Sask-E forces Destry to choose sides in a conflict that alters her beloved planet’s future.įrom here the novel takes running leaps through time. Their true goal, not shockingly, is profit. But as the good-hearted Destry discovers, the developers who created Sask-E-and who hold both her job and her life in their clutches-aren’t out to make a better world. Sask-E appears at first to be an Eden of wild beauty and limitless potential. One is a resource-plundering, trash-talking, trash-generating, remotely operated proxy, and the other is Destry, an Environmental Rescue Team ranger who proceeds to show what happens when someone tries to mess with her boreal forest. Except in this case, the alien world is an early-stage planet called Sask-E, which has been modeled after the original Earth by a terraforming corporation known as Verdance, and the first encounter is between two very different versions of Homo sapiens. The novel’s first scene sends up a classic trope of science fiction, the “first contact,” in which representatives from two civilizations meet on an alien world. ![]() Even if takes a millennium’s worth of creativity to offset rapacious corporations, unethical developers, ineffective governments and standard-issue corruption. Yet the novel smartly argues that people-particularly when the term expands to include sentient forms far beyond humans-might just be a planet’s best resource. It will surprise no one that the answer is a resounding “well, maybe.” Newitz’s formidable imagination can’t change the fact that people are people. In The Terraformers, the new novel from i09 founder and former Gizmodo editor in chief Annalee Newitz, the central question points straight at our planet’s existential crisis: Given the painful lessons we’ve learned about how not to build a sustainable, equitable future, what if people had a chance to create a cleaner, fairer Earth 2.0? Could we succeed? Great stories often start from a tantalizing “what if?”-the more irresistibly original the premise, the better. What kind of world would humanity build with another chance to do it right?
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