So let’s start by saying that I adored this book. I thought it was so creative and so fun and so thought-provoking and so educational. I loved the solarpunk aspect. I loved the anarchist philosophy. I loved the discussions about personhood and sentience. I loved the organic technology. I loved how much I learned about terraforming and self-governance and waterways as I read it. I’m a big fan of sci-fi and spec fic, and after mostly reading dystopian books it was a real pleasure to read about a futuristic high-tech society that isn’t a cyberpunk nightmare wasteland devoid of hope or promise for once. There are realistic players in The Terraformers: of course you have your evil megacorps, though there was some nuance with how the megacorp people were portrayed, and there are the scrappy rebels (with some of the rebels prepared to be much more destructive than others). 

I do have some critiques—mostly about characterization and pacing—but I’ll get into that a bit later. Let’s talk about the overall plot of the book.

The book takes place way way way in the future. Humans (often referred to as “hominids” in the narrative) have expanded far beyond their home planet of Earth and are now colonizing every Earth-like planet they can get their greedy little graspers on. In order to facilitate this goal, huge terraforming companies like Verdance, which is one of the main entities/antagonists, find suitable planets with the right gravity, water, sunlight, etc. and spend centuries or longer making the planet habitable for humans. This means that they have to introduce the right levels of oxygen into the atmosphere, carefully monitor the food chain of all the different ecosystems, oversee the carbon cycle, etc. Once the planet is fairly Earth-like in terms of flora/fauna/biomes, then it’s prime real estate, baby. Hominids and other “people” (more on them later) can purchase extremely expensive remote bodies so that they can experience life on a pristine Earth as if they were there in the flesh, or if they have oodles of cash and access to space transportation, they can outright buy property and become settlers. And if you’re thinking that this book sounds like an exploration of how settler-colonialism might play out eons into the future, then you’re right on the money. 

The main characters of the book change four or five times throughout the story. The first main character is Destry. She’s an employee of the Environmental Response Team, or ERT for short. The ERT is an independent organization whose entire purpose is to oversee the delicate balance of all the components that comprise a planet’s environment: carbon, water, light, food networks, etc. Verdance works with the ERT to make sure that their terraforming projects are successful. After all, you can’t advertise a beautiful unpolluted “untouched” planet virtually indistinguishable from Earth in its Pleistocene Era if you let settlers make a bunch of carbon and throw the climate out of whack, or dump hazardous wastes into the water supply all willy-nilly. There’s a fascinating interplay between the megacorps and the ERT: their goals align when it comes to preserving the environment of a planet, but then the entities butt heads when the companies start getting greedy and cutting corners in order to facilitate faster sales and higher ROI. 

Anyway, the main plot of the novel kicks off when Destry and some other ERT associates discover unusual seismic activity on the planet that is currently being terraformed by Verdance. Upon investigation, the ERT discovers that a secret society has been flourishing deep underground for hundreds of years, right under Verdance’s nose. The inhabitants of this huge underground civilization call their home “Spider City,” and many of them are descendants from Verdance’s first wave of terraformers from centuries ago. These original terraformers aren’t even Homo sapiens—rather, they are our distant relatives, similar to Neanderthals or the like, and their bodies, which were genetically altered by Verdance, are uniquely suited to breathe the air on the planet before the oxygen levels are brought up to human range. The thing is, Verdance intended for the first few generations of terraformers to do their jobs preparing the planet for habitation by Homo sapiens and then die. Verdance had no idea that some of the first terraformers would retreat underground, far from Verdance’s sophisticated and omnipresent surveillance tech, to begin building Spider City. 

Now, centuries later, the citizens of Spider City aren’t too pleased that the planet is almost ready to be divvied up and sold to rich colonizing assholes. The element of surprise isn’t the only thing the Spider City denizens have over Verdance, either. If the megacorp doesn’t play nice, then Spider City might have to resort to some explosive measures. Destry finds herself embroiled in a conflict between a collective of rebels and one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the galaxy. Inevitably she finds herself siding with Spider City, but at the same time, she is employed by Verdance, and the power it has over both her and the planet itself is almost unassailable. 

Almost.

Anyway, so that’s the hook. Now I want to talk about some of the worldbuilding, which was pretty much my favorite part of The Terraformers. First let’s talk a little more about Verdance. This megacorp designs, creates, and “births” its own employees, though it would be more accurate to call them indentured servants if not outright slaves, through a process called “decanting.” Technology has advanced to the point where organisms, including sentient humans, can be planned out in labs and grown in artificial wombs. Verdance owns its employees: after all, the company has a patent on the genetic material used to create them and it went through all the trouble of decanting them, so they belong to Verdance for the entirety of their lifespan. Verdance can create specific hominids for specific purposes. Not only can the company customize appearance and even species, traits like intelligence can also be engineered according to desired levels. At least, that’s what Verdance wants you to think.

Besides Destry, the other first main character is her moose-like Mount, Whistle. Mounts are creatures that have the physical appearance of a riding animal like a horse (though often with various inorganic components to aid in various functions) but the sentience of a human. A Mount’s job is pretty much right there in the title: hominids like Destry sometimes need to be able to climb on the back of a Mount so it can provide transport over land, sea, and even air. A Mount’s intelligence and sentience can also confer other benefits, but Verdance doesn’t want most Mounts to be too intelligent. There is a strict hierarchy present at all levels of the company, and this includes hominids and their Mounts. Mounts are strictly second-class to their hominid counterparts. 

The reader discovers that Mounts aren’t actually any less intelligent or sapient than humans; rather, Verdance has installed secret “intelligence limiters” inside the brains of Mounts so that they can’t be too smart. After all, you wouldn’t want a car that could randomly decide to take a different course than the one you requested, right? In Whistle’s case, his intelligence limiter prevents him from using words more than two or three syllables long. As a result, he virtually never speaks (even though he has full verbal ability) because it takes him too long to form sentences that convey his desired meaning without being too syllabic or complex. And much later in the book, this idea of limiting unwanted intelligence in beasts of burden is explored to a terrifying degree when megacorps create a class of person called a “Blessed.” One Blessed, aptly named Chef because her entire life’s purpose is to be a chef for a Verdance executive, can only talk about things related to cooking or eating. Cleverly she learns how to work around the intelligence limiter by always mentioning food no matter what subject she addresses, and after moving to the city of Tooth, she finds that it is much easier to communicate as long as she frequently references the name of her new home.

This brings up something mentioned earlier: the concept of “personhood.” Technology exists that can enable any communicative being—robot, car, dishwasher, moose, cat, naked mole rat—to become fully sapient and sentient. This is why the term “person” no longer just refers to a human, but rather to all kinds of beings. One of my favorite “people” in the book is a train that was decanted in Spider City and modeled in part after the nervous systems of earthworms. Frequently the status of “person” is explored. Whistle was technically a person, but as a Mount with “limited intelligence,” he was regularly made to feel like a lower class of person. There’s also some debate between characters about the ethics of creating a being that could be a person, but isn’t, because the creator chooses not to bestow sapience. One character bemoans the indignity of creating a non-sapient/non-sentient machine like a car, which must transport others with no thought or desires of its own, and therefore is subject to a life to which it did not—could not—consent.

Speaking of consent, there’s a lot in this book that could be described as “woke.” I generally use that term in a positive context, because I’m not a fascist anti-intellectual non-empathetic prick, but I have no doubt in my mind that certain reactionary readers will lambast The Terraformers as “woke they/them commie bullshit.” And they’d be right about that (mostly). Spider City and the ERT are both collectivist and anarchist.  There is no central leader or governing body that rules unilaterally. I love the way they make decisions as a group: votes are counted and the majority rules, but the minority gets to demand one concession that must be implemented in the final resolution.

And as far as the “they/them” stuff goes, there’s a lot of it. Characters regularly introduce themselves by giving their names and pronouns. Several of the main characters, possibly even the majority, use “they/them,” and I tip my hat to Newitz for their ability to write scenes with multiple agender or nonbinary characters that aren’t confusing. That’s not as difficult with characters as varied as who we meet in The Terraformers: cats, moose, robotic cows, doors (yes, like the kind that you open to go inside a house).

That’s perhaps one of my only real criticisms of the book. The characters’ personalities are sometimes indistinguishable. Some characters are written with such compelling and grounded personalities that you never for a moment confuse them with anyone else, whereas other characters are only told apart because of their physical differences. For instance, Moose the cat (not actually as confusing as it sounds) is written to be a sly, clever, stereotypically cat-like journalist and investigator with a personality that is all their own. The train that appears towards the end of the book has neat little idiosyncrasies like a love of online gaming and a constant need to find the fastest and most optimal route when traveling through the skies. But then other characters, including Destry from the beginning of the book, are written with such little personality that they become forgettable. 

Since I’m on the topic of criticisms, I would say that the other weakness of The Terraformers is the lack of stakes. As a reader, I just never truly felt that anyone was in any kind of serious danger. I never thought that the Spider City rebels weren’t going to come out on top. Yes, there were deaths and violence, but the main characters were pretty protected from most of it. Spoiler alert: Whistle endures a grievous head injury during a battle with Verdance drones but survives. In fact, he comes out better for it because the cranial trauma disables his intelligence limiters, which results in him being able to express himself fully for the first time in his life. Personally, if I were the editor, I would have either explored the idea of the intelligence limiter destruction with another character entirely and had Whistle die, or maybe let him live for a while without the intelligence limiter and then die, to really get the reader invested in his journey and then absolutely devastated when the megacorp kills him with a drone strike or whatever. But, hey, that’s just me. And as far as Spider City goes, it is revealed fairly early on that the citizens have access to technology that can obliterate the entire planet. It would come at the cost of heavy casualties to their own people, but Verdance just can’t compete with the Spider City weapon because the last thing the company wants to do is nuke its own precious planet that it spent tons of money terraforming. This means that I was never really under the impression that Verdance had a chance of suppressing the rebels, because the only way it could do that is by cutting off its nose to spite its face and allowing the planetary destruction to happen unchecked (if not saying “fuck it” and vaporizing the whole damn thing itself). See, that’s another idea of mine: what if the reader is led to believe that Spider City has Verdance right where they want them, since there’s no way the megacorp will destroy its own special little investment, but then BAM—Verdance nukes the planet from orbit to teach Spider City, along with anyone else watching the conflict unfold, a lesson that they will never forget. Maybe I’m just a cynic, though. Or a sadist. You tell me. 

I think I’ve said most of what I wanted to say about The Terraformers, but here’s where I’ll make a quick list of other things in the book that I thought were cool: the house-growing technology, where you plant seeds along a trellis and then slowly walls and a roof grow over the span of weeks; the non-Homo sapiens hominids (the first citizens of Spider City) that are hermaphroditic and have both female genitalia (“petals”) and male genitalia (“stamens”), the giant bio-techno hybrid flying trains that made me picture the “Catbus” from My Neighbor Totoro, the descriptions of food, the snarky sentient door to Spider City that later marries an ERT drone, the naked mole rats that operate as a hive mind.

All in all, it was a fabulous and engrossing read that still has my mind churning weeks after completing it. Can’t wait to read more by this author. The solarpunk/hope-core/bio-techno hybrids makes me think of A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which also features a nonbinary protagonist. Might need to give that one a reread soon.