Oleksandr Zholud's Reviews > The Terraformers

This is an environmental social heavily message-oriented SF novel. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for June 2023 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group. The book was published in 2023 and quite possibly will end up among the next year's SFF awards nominees (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc.) for the author already has been nominated several times for both her fiction and her SFF activism (her fancast Our Opinions Are Correct is three-times Hugo winner).

This ought to have been a story that presses all my pleasure buttons – it has (as the name suggests) terraforming with its many issues, talking uplifted animals, real-life issues ‘guised’ as SF ones. However, on almost every topic it fell short, or it was just me in a grumpy mood.

The story starts on the planet Sask-E, which is in the process of millennia-old terraforming process. There is a conflict between the formal owner and investor – corporation Verdance and people, who do the actual hands-on work on the surface, among them the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT). The year is 59’006 (the founding of ERT and Great Bargain, definitely faaaar future) and ERT Ranger Destry Thomas sees that someone ‘destroys’ the environment she and others put centuries growing up – some kind of H. sapiens, which is a dirty slur here, is making a cabin, burning wood and skinning small animals. The Ranger has a unique sensory system, allowing her to ‘feel’ problems of the surrounding environment, be it a lack of specific materials or another disequilibrium.

This turns out that there is one of the potential buyers – Verdance advertises the planet as the Pleistocene, the purest environment for mankind, for those dreaming of old good days (really old in this case). And this guy is not even a person – he is a remote, a doll operated from elsewhere. This doesn’t preclude him from being a jerk and after he doesn’t comply, she just shoots him (remote) dead. This is interesting on several levels, including the likely suggestion that the name Destry comes from US 1939 movie Destry Rides Again, where the hero brings civility to a wild western town by refusing to wear a gun. Here, Destry uses a gun and then tries to cover what she has done.

The Ranger is accompanied by a talking flying moose named Whistle and he is an example of ERT approach - We are not humans and animals. We are allies in the Great Bargain. It seems that long ago, when Earth was on a brink of environmental collapse, ERT found a way to open communication with other life forms in order to manage the land more democratically. The ERT started with domesticated animals—ungulates, birds, small mammals, model organisms like rats—and over the millennia since, rangers had invited more species into the Great Bargain as their opinions became necessary for land management. (why only land, not e.g. water isn’t specified). These uplifted animals are people (even if not Homo) and even here evildoers introduced a barrier - InAss ratings (the League’s “intelligence assessment” rating system), which allows treating some people as property. In the case of Whistle the moose – he is a mount, not a person (with which the Ranger vehemently disagrees). The sentient animals and social conflicts they create aren’t new in SF – from Cordwainer Smith in the 1950s to David Brin in the 1980s to cite just two. However, I guess using them as partners in protecting the ecosystem is new.

Back to the story, now let me see an example of what irked me a great deal throughout the novel – it is implicitly assumed that good people do good things. The jerk from the piece above got his due for hunting animals and playing a primitive man. Ok, but later good people change a course of a major river and it is fine. Heck, it just coincided that I’ve read it when Russian occupiers blew off the dam of Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. The dam held back a reservoir equal in volume to the Great Salt Lake, so now the lands below it are flooded, with massive destruction of property, the number of victims yet unknown. The negative consequences of the flooding are likely to be felt for years. However, the Ranger, who killed a remote for hunting a few animals has no problem with whole habitats destroyed, if good people do it, for they have needs.

As the story progresses there are several modern problems hot in the USA presented in the future, that have quite different tech and problems, among which are: public transport, the need for bigger government (against corporations), gentrification (which evicts poorer people), carbon neutrality. Are these issues important? Yes, moreover, I’m in line with the author’s views on most of them (as far as I understand them). But this is faaar future – they don’t burn hydrocarbon fuels, the husbandry is for a selected few – is at that planet carbon neutrality that important with its small population and clean energy? Public transport is important now in the US because the policy of two cars per family leads among other things to traffic jams and huge areas devoted to parking. But at that planet we have clean anti-grav, allowing for 3D movement, solving both issues. And so on, activist message made poor SF for it has linked present problems with future tech, which makes them obsolete.