Thomas Wagner | SFF180's Reviews > The Terraformers

Following their second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz published Four Lost Cities, a nonfiction book about some of the earliest examples of urban life in human history. The Terraformers, Newitz’s long-awaited third novel, builds on that subject with a story about designer worlds and urban planning set more than sixty thousand years in the future. It’s not a long book, but it has massive scope, with an episodic structure that makes reading it feel like you’ve just binged three seasons of a TV series. It can be more than a little uneven. But on balance, the story’s impact is formidable, a solidly adult work of problem-solving science fiction that feels both old-school and beautifully innovative at once.

The world is Sask-E, under development by the Verdance corporation as a bespoke planet for wealthy clients seeking prime real estate in a virginal Pleistocene environment. Towards that goal, Verdance has created their own genetically engineered people, with lifespans that cover centuries, to live on Sask-E and oversee the process of ecosystem maintenance as members of the Environmental Rescue Team.

But “people” refers to more than just Homo sapiens in this future. In a manner reminiscent of David Brin’s Uplift series, the Great Bargain was a process that followed a series of eco-wars on Earth that brought about the end of the anthropocene, by which millions of animal species were bootstrapped into sapience. Naturally, this provides the story with one of its main sources of conflict: Verdance’s entire terraforming project relies on a slave labor force of living beings the company decanted and therefore legally own as property. The ethics of it get worse when we learn some species have been developed with inhibitors on their intelligence to enforce compliance.

The narrative spans over 1600 years, and begins when Ranger Destry Thomas of the ERT discovers that an entire hidden city exists inside an active volcano, Mt. Spider. Spider City is populated by Archaeans, some of the earliest people to be decanted by Verdance, whose intended role was to get the whole process of terraforming going and then die off as they were no longer needed. But die off they didn’t, and now they want their independence, including access to an adjacent river. (Continued...)