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Let the Story Breath: A Review of Terraformers By Annalee Newitz [1]

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Date: 2023-03-20  

I am not sure how much I like Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. Not a great lead for a review, I admit, but honest all the same. The book has a ton of strengths, as most of Newitz's writing does. He characters work is strong -- which is incredibly important given that this book takes place over the course of a few hundred years, switches protagonists several times and only really keeps villains around for the length of the book. Her world building is fascinating. Sask-e is a planet, and entire universe actually but we only really see the one planet, where anything from a worm to a train can be a person and people can slide into custom made bodies. But the private is privately owned, in the process of being terraformed, and most of the people are too, some with intelligence limiters and none with anything you would recognize as human rights.

It is a fascinating setup, both from a scientific and political point of view. The ethics of environmentalism and terraforming make a nice platform for the revolution that is the eventual heart of the book. Newlitz says in the afterword that she wanted to show that revolutions take a long time to come to fruition and she does this by cutting the action into three sections to show three critical moments that build toward the eventual revolution on the planet. One of the obvious inspirations for this work is the Robinson's Mars trilogy, which did something similar on a similar topic. I don't think that Terraformers works as well, in part because it is one book.

The three sections are a little too neat, the action resolved a bit too cleanly in each case. What to me seem like obvious complications aren't followed up on or are mentioned but dropped. I should say that all of the strands she starts are woven together expertly by the end in sometimes surprisingly but satisfying ways. She has the best kinds of surprises -- the ones you don't see coming but know immediately had to happen based on what you read earlier. I liked the book better the more I read.

Overall I would recommend Terraformers. It is well written with good characters and lots of fascinating ideas. It just happens to be one of the rare books where I wish it had been expanded into more so that the ideas and plot had been given proper space to breath.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/20/2158934/-Let-the-Story-Breath-A-Review-of-Terraformers-By-Annalee-Newitz

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