Book Review
The Terraformers (2023)
by Annalee Newitz
I first read journalist/fiction writer Annalee Newitz back in 2021 when I read her work of non-fiction, Four Lost Cities. That book was an interesting attempt at the popularization of recent findings supported by the use of LIDAR ground-reading technology which allowed archeologists to see the outlines of buildings buried several feet below the surface. This has led to a mini-revolution in the study of the collapse of civilizations, which seems to be a central pre-occupation of Newitz in both her fiction and non-fiction work.
The review I read of her recent work of speculative fiction, The Terraformers, an at times and at times almost comically dull exploration of the far-future business of planet development, written from the perspective of the broadly defined "people" that populate Newitz's speculative universe, was not positive, or at least not wildly positive, but I went ahead and picked up the Audiobook anyway because this is clearly a work of speculative written from what you might call an alternative viewpoint, and that elevates it above more conventional genre works in the area.
Newitz's universe is an interesting blend of hyper-capitalism and the post-scarcity anarchical world of Iain Bank's "The Culture" series. Parts of The Terraformers are instantly recognizable- the hyper capitalist planet developers speak with a distinct southern accent and the entire book revolves around the for-profit development/terraformers of a "private planet" by a multi-galaxy human led corporation; other parts are beyond wild: As part of something called the "farm revolution" and the "grand bargain" which apparently takes place in OUR near future, personhood is expanded to all sorts of non-human species. Humans themselves have subdivided- you've got the traditional homo sapiens- who have evolved into body hopping demigods with access to limitless capital and lifespans of thousands of years. On the other hand, you've got homo divertis (or something to that effect), which comprises everyone else. Hardly anyone in this world is born, rather people speak of "being decanted" and the idea of people as property does not raise a collective eyebrow.
Sentient trains have a disturbingly large place in the narrative as do the "realistic" problems of planet development- which makes parts of The Terraformers read like a New Yorker article written about public transit issues in space. Personally though I like this book more for that feature- like Newitz has put some thought into her prose. And if the plot is sometimes pokey, well, there are worse things to be in speculative fiction.
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