Peter Tillman's Reviews > The Terraformers

A flawed but worthwhile novel. It starts out well, with a short war as an early climax. Then a slow middle section, with long quotes from internal memos from one of the two corporate monsters in the book. This section had me wondering if I wanted to keep reading. Fortunately, the third section, with atrocities from the second and worse corporate monster, led to a hopeful ending.

As you can see nearby, other readers reactions are mixed: the current average rating is a bit over 3.4 stars. Which is just about my rating, and I'm undecided between rounding up or down. OK, I had enough reading fun to round up. Cautiously recommended. You may want to skim over some of the tedious middle section.

Here's Paul Di Filippo's enthusiastic review, which led me to read the book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
[porous paywall -- free acct. required]
Excerpt:
"The reader of Annalee Newitz’s third novel, “The Terraformers,” will surely walk away, stunned and bedazzled . . . This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours. The story — which begins nearly 60,000 years in the future and unfolds over more than a millennium — rollicks along at a brisk clip while allowing
allowing Newitz space to dig into characters and milieu, and pile on startling speculative elements."