This was my first read from author and I think I got some enlightening when got my hands on her book.
Terraformers was nothing like my usually fantasy read. The story was about large company who owned a far future Terraforming planet. The goal is to create a perfect future for humankind.

The idea and premise are ambitious, grand and genius. For me this is a good challenging book but not easy to absorb. It was take my times but worth it.

The characters are alot and when they only did short appearances, it become difficult to connected with them. I am not feel them flesh out enough.

This book will perfect for reader who want something visionary to think about from their reads.

Thank you to Netgalley and Orbit from Little Brown Books Group UK for providing a copy of this ebook. I have voluntarily read and reviewed it. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

4 stars - Left-leaning Sci-Fi brimming with ideas

I had not read anything by Annalee Newitz before but had already heard many good things about The Terraformers, so I was very curious to read it for myself. And it was quite the experience!

From the outside, this is the story of a company-owned planet's terraforming project which is a process of thousands of years, helped along by the hard work of many people who will never see the results of their dedication. The book is split up into several parts, each taking place hundreds or thousands of years apart but loosely connected by recurring characters (life expectancy is much higher in the future and also not all sentient life is biological or bound to one body any longer). We watch the planet transform from a very vulnerable, barely functioning fledgling ecosystem to a up-and-coming tourist location with all this brings to a place.

Using this frame Newitz explores plenty of potential issues such a setup might bring along like issues of corporate ownership over sentient beings (leading effectively to slavery), homocentric concepts and measures of intelligence, the conflict of ecological vs. capitalist interests and many more. It is very obvious that Newitz is leaning to the left which was just fine with me as I agree with her stance on almost all points. For those who like their reading without political opinions this might be a dealbreaker though.
Personally, this made for pretty cozy reading though as I could rely on the absence of any fundamental jerk moves from the author's side. In the end, not all but at least some will be well but the bad guys will get their comeuppance.

The prose helped the cozy feeling along, having a distinctly calm and quiet no-nonsense-tone to it. Also The Terraformers is absolutely brimming with great, inventive and actually plausible ideas for a world in the very far future (think several ten thousands of years into the future). The world-building happens very organically and Newitz does rarely rely on infodumps but rather lets the reader figure out what some of the fundamental concepts of this future society, like the Great Bargain, mean. It makes for engaging reading but also means that as a reader we have to put in a bit of work as well.

This one of these books that stays with you and I heartily recommend this to anyone who enjoys their Sci-Fi with a little dose of idealism!

I have received an advance review copy via NetGalley from the publisher and voluntarily provide my honest opinion. Thank you very much!

I was really excited about this book but I didn't connect with it. Thank you for the opportunity to read it though. Interesting ideas, but a little slow paced.

The premise of this was fascinating - it just didn't work me. I didn't like the world building and I wasn't a fan of the characters nor the plot.

Overall it's an interesting take on climate, evolution and technology. This is quite a long book. It's actually really 3 books in one: a story of origins, a romance and a mystery/story about war. There are wonderful characters spread across centuries that link together between the three parts of the novel, and some protagonists are of unexpected shape or form. It's thought provoking and I will think about the characters and their lessons for many days to come.

The Terraformers is an epic science fiction novel told in three parts. I struggled with it because of the pace and characters.

It has been said that Science Fiction is often about problem solving and its consequences. Often we get tales where a device makes things better or sadly worse. The space of time is fairly short but many types of problems are not going to be solved in a day or a week and that long-term view is something we humans struggle with. In Annalee Newitz’s ambitious and very interesting new novel The Terraformers we get to witness over a few thousand years an incredibly varied new world grows, battle its competing interests and see if a perfect future can ever be possible.

In the far future Terraforming is all the rage and also good business. One of the latest is the far-off planet Sask-E owned by the large corporation Verdance who tale worlds and offer pristine new untouched Earths for future (and rich) to colonise. But it takes thousands of years to make a new world and Verdance grows and owns a vast collection of beings to nurture and take care of the planet often applying the skills of the illustrious Environmental Rescue Team one member is Destry and her sentient companion (and flying moose) Whistle. A mission to explore an anomaly discovers a community hidden from the eyes of Verdance and Destry and her friends finds themselves soon in the firing line for a battle between corporate strategy, short-term gain and a desire for environmental and social freedom.

I was asked when I told someone I was reading this if it would be suitable for a newbie to SF and overall my sense is this would not. But for those who enjoy a challenging and ambitious piece of SF then this would appeal. It is absolutely full of ideas, concepts and plays with structure and time in ways that will mean the reader needs to be kept on their toes and be prepared for a few unexpected terms. There are not many stories that will have scenes of animal burlesque, sentient cows and have a starring role for a talking flying train and their friend a journalist cat! Newitz has created a fascinating world where everyone is technically company property and also sentience is fascinatingly now spread across articifical and enhanced life which stealthily the novel gently gets us to accept.

Newitz initially starts with Destry as a central character and she takes lead but her friends are drones, creatures and humans. In this story while each character may have views on other species they all interact as equals and indeed as the story develops one key plotline is intelligence. Verdance has strict intelligence assessments but most of Destry’s group scathingly refer to them as ‘Inass’ as the story develops we see how people all re-appraise if some ‘lesser’creatures really cannot be the equals of the superior hominids. Destry’s tale though ends in about a third of the novel and the second of the three parts is set 500 years later and we gradually meet more and more enhanced creatures so that by the final part of the story our heroes are not human at all. Its great to see a story push the reader to accept a character that can be far more than just a lantern jawed hero.

For me this feels a novel more of ideas rather than a standard hero sorts things out. Newitz in the first segment of the story explores a theme of environmental conscientiousness versus a company just seeing profit and not caring about the consequences. Destry’s group are communal problem solvers; happy to debate and take a consensus while the Verdance are all about the bottom line and care not for the long-term consequences. It’s very much conflicting point of views like this that drive the tale. As the story develops this looks into issues of urban planning and transport networks. Not the usual focus of an SF tale but skillfuly I can see Newitz making reference to issues facing many cities today. A lack of planning that means we don’t have good public transport; high rents forcing out long-term citizens and slowly you may realise that we have a story telling us a lot more about modern day life than you may have initially expected. Newitz also makes the point that the seeds of good and bad planning take centuries to work themselves out hence this tale that covers a few millennia. Ponder what just 500 years means for your neighbourhood! This means it can be disconcerting that pretty much all the cast change less than half way through the story. The idea that the past passes the torch to the future generations to now manage is useful but I think the second act slightly suffers from Destry’s absence as we lose a character who is warm, questioning, good hearted and has just discovered some key facts changing their whole view of the world and their own personal history and it doesn’t feel quite resolved before we say goodbye to Destry for good. Our next main character Misha is hiding secrets which will be revealed but they are a little too removed from the reader to initially warm towards for quite a large part of their story which makes you miss Destry even more.

The drawback for me is all these storylines require a huge amount of exposition and every scene gives us characters discussing facst and changes. A lot of scenes feel more about that process and argument. Now I like processes and argument so this book quite works for me and the look at how a lack of understanding about our natural and urban environment leads to our current messes works well for me but sometimes I think a few more glimpses at what life is like for people on this world and showing how things have got worse over the centuries would have really helped gel readers into the plot.

I really enjoyed The Terraformers because it’s challenging; daring to do its own thing in both world and character creation and is always focused on the themes. But I think this may alarm some. Personally I think books should be occasionally unsettling and take us out of our comfort zone as to what heroes and story are but it’s a caveat to warn. If you though like a brave piece of storytelling run and get this and stretch your mind.

This is really 3 stories in one book.

Unfortunately that is where it stalls.

The first story really pulled me in with great characters and interesting world building.

Unfortunately the following stories lacked the depth of character even though they followed the first story over several hundred / thousands of years.

This was definitely let down by the last two stories.

I do love the concept of the story but the more I get into the book, the more it is dragging for me. The characters are quite bland and one-dimensional. Like I don't care what happen just passing through their narratives.

The book is definitely more an idea driven thing rather than plot driven thing, but if you go in with the right expectations, there is a lot to take away here and digest! In that sense, it reminds me of Chinese SFF which also tends to be idea-driven; but then again, it was my first book by the author. Enjoyable when you are in market for exactly this type of cerebral SFF.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of Terraformers.

Having loved all of their previous works I was certain I was going to enjoy The Terraformers, what I wasn't expecting is how this book managed to perfectly walk the line between hope-filled and thought-provoking, proving what we all knew - that Science Fiction can (and frequently does) do it all.
The Terraformers explores a theme common in a lot of science fiction, that of terraforming and the idea of what capitalism looks like in the future. One might think based on that theme that this would be a fairly bleak book - but the overarching message of this story is that there may be a future somewhere where we might just be able to make better choices against the odds! This isn't a perfect world where nothing is working against that but that only adds to the sense of achievement this book provides. I would recommend this to those who find some of the more 'comfort' science fiction too idealistic but who don't want to read pure doom and gloom.
This book is packed full of interesting characters and world-building elements which I really think you should experience for yourself - all I'll say is that never before have I fallen quite so in love with a mode of public transportation!
I'll be adding The Terraformers to my list of science fiction books that I recommend - joining two other Annalee Newitz books that were already there. If you're not reading their works you're missing out for sure!

Entertaining, visionary, full of food for thought and well plotted. It's not a classic sci fi story but a mix of different genre an I enjoyed this story.
It's the first book I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

To be perfectly honest, this is one of those books which started off strong for me and then suddenly lost its way, mostly when I discovered that it really wasn't one complete narrative - having spent time and energy building up one set of characters, suddenly we're dealing with years later and then this happens again for a third time. That's a narrative device that didn't work for me.

The basic premise of The Terraformers is strong enough, as it's set on a planet called Sask-E whose development is being promoted and monitored by our first POV character. Destry is a ranger who's effectively been created by a large corporation and who is tasked with looking after Sask-E's environment as it progresses. This is a new world which is under the control of two such corporations as we start off, all of whom are selling the experience of a primeval world to rich arseholes and don't really give a damn about the people who are making that world a reality.

It's during a routine patrol, getting away from the repercussions of a previous mission gone slightly awry, that Destry comes across the unexpected - in this case, another civilisation, formed by people who were 'seeded' onto the planet for the purpose of building its environment but who were supposed to then die out. Instead, these people have thrived, developing new technologies and also making new alliances. The corporations, of course, aren't going to like this very much, especially when there's a dispute over water and the newly discovered population threaten to take matters into their own hands to resolve it.

The next third of the book details the aftermath of how Destry resolves this, but sadly with mostly a new set of characters. Once again, the author spends a lot of effort trying to establish them, only to have the majority of them disappear for the final part of the book. There are also sub-plots around the line between human and not, in terms of sentience and the right to self-determination, so that may not be some people's thing either. All in all, the overall world-building works for me but I wish it had been more of a consistent narrative.

I received a free copy of this book from the publishers, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this, especially having recently listened to Annalee Newitz and their partner Charlie Jane Anders talking their podcast <em>All Our Opinions Are Correct</em>, episode №124 “<a href="https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/shownotes/2023/1/25/episode-124-how-to-build-a-planet">How to Build a Planet</a>” and hearing about a sentient moose being a favourite characters.

Set in 3 sequential timeframes (with maps! 🎉), our protagonists in 2 of those are part of the Environmental Rescue Team, a collective society, all of whom have been engineered to create the privately-owned planet Sask-E from scratch for a corporation and its highly privileged clients. With the ERT made up of sentient beings after the Great Bargain brought human-like intelligence and sentience to all kinds of animals and non- or part-biological species, we follow the sentient moose and his <a href="https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/hominid-and-hominin-whats-the-difference/">hominin</a> colleague in the first third, as they investigate the unexpected; then 2 hominins, following the consequences of the previous part, looking at how the new cities are developing and planning planetwide transport infrastructure. The third part sees 2 non-hominin protagonists as we see the events of the previous centuries come together to change Sask-E for everyone.

I’m always a sucker for tales of revolution, especially ones that critique the worst aspects of our new <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age">Gilded Age</a> of late-stage capitalism, but all our protagonists are compelling and delightful, the antagonists are not pantomime villains (though certainly could be a little more complexly-drawn than they are), and the plot is interesting and engaging. While I’ve seen comparisons with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopepunk">hopepunk</a>, such as the works of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becky_Chambers">Becky Chambers</a>, the feel-good aspects and collective efforts are certainly present but there are enough dystopian elements and life-threatening jeopardy that I wouldn’t include it in the genre myself. That said, this is definitely not a criticism — jeopardy and dystopian aspects included this has been one of my favourite reads of the last few months and I’m going to have to buy a copy to re-read in the future.

I received an advance copy for free from NetGalley, on the expectation that I would provide an honest review.

What a nutty book this is. Nutty in a good way as bonkers, funny and unexpected. The terraforming novel is a well-worn sci-fi trope - Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, the gold standard perhaps, is by turns geological, social and political. Newitz’s take introduces the corporate - as the planet Sask-E is being slowly transformed by generations of workers under the control of the Verdance corporation. The workers themselves are not just human, they are all forms of animal decanted and raised to fulfil a particular role in the process and then die out. Newitz’s angle majors on biological engineering: not only can animals be bred to fulfil particular roles, their intelligence can be precisely calibrated and controlled by the corporation from non-verbal right up to full sentience. Newitz’s three-part structure, with connected but different characters for each third of the book, is not without its challenges for the reader - particularly in the middle section which seems to move the plot forwards very slowly. Everything comes together very satisfyingly in the final section so bear with the mid-section slowdown. Alongside all this there’s romantic entanglements, unionisation, animal rights, sexual politics and environmental issues in the mix. Entertaining, optimistic and with I kid you not, a heavy nod to My Neighbour Totoro’s catbus, this is a great read.

In common with many sci fi authors, Newitz is highly critical of the capitalist economic model. It’s a system that Newitz roundly critiques in both Autonomous and The Terraformers. In this far, far future adventure – Ronnie has helped design a pristine planet to resemble Earth before Humanity came along and spoilt it. And now she needs it to make a profit… Of course, she hasn’t got her own hands dirty – carefully designed workers with all sorts of modifications have been the ones toiling away to ensure the planet’s eco-system keeps ticking over as perfectly as possible. Destry is one such worker and in the opening section of the book, is a main protagonist.

I loved the modified, cyborg animals, particularly Moose, who is Destry’s Mount and can carry her anywhere she needs to go, because Moose can also fly. However, he has a limiter on his brain so that he can only speak using single-syllable words. Though at least he can express himself about a wide range of subjects – Blessed models are built with a limiter in their brains so they can only talk about their work, even though they have the intellect to understand and have opinions on so much more.

Essentially, this is a story about a class struggle that spans centuries, set upon a beautiful world that is in the process of being settled with the aim of making the corporation owning the land the maximum amount of money. And although that might sound like a bleak premise, the book isn’t. Newitz has given us a beautiful world which she depicts with great vividness with all sorts of quirky creatures peopling it. Along with dear old Moose, I also rather fell in love with Scrubjay, a flying, talking train. Yep – I know it sounds like a bonkers episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, but I was able to suspend my disbelief sufficiently to get thoroughly caught up in the story. In amongst the anger at the exploitation and inevitable rebellion and bloodshed, there are lovely moments of working together, companionship, love affairs and the sharing of food.

I came away from reading this one with a smile on my face – and a sense that being alive, with friends and family to love and share food with, living on a planet where there is so much beauty, in a body that is my very own – makes me very fortunate. Highly recommended for fans of sci fi colony adventures with a strong environmental message. While I obtained an audiobook arc of The Terraformers from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

**I was provided with an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

This book is something totally different to anything I’ve read before.
Sectioned into 3 stories which take place in the far future each a couple of centuries apart, The Terraformers narrates the development of a planet called Sask-E which is being made into an “old Earth” away from Earth by the private corporation that owns it.

The first story follows a member of the Environmental Rescue Team – who help oversee the terraforming project – and a conundrum that she faces when she stumbles across a civilisation believed to be extinct living in secret on the planet. The second story follows another group of characters developing a viable transit system for the planet who start to uncover some of the questionable dealings that the ruling corporations are involved with, and this particular storyline is further explored in the third story.

Each story is linked to the next through certain actions and events that occur in the previous one and I really liked how through this span of time we got to see the long term evolution of the setting and the communities of this world. This is something that much longer series fail to do but Newitz has done really well to capture in just over 300 pages.

The extensive worldbuilding which encompasses such a distinctive future is full of feats in science and technology which will equally awe and perplex you. There are a vast array of characters that come into the fray ranging from humanoids to animals and even robots all of varying levels of intelligence and personhood – this includes a flying sentient train who is one of the leading protagonists. Outlandish concepts aside, it allowed the story to bring into discussion many prominent social and ecological issues.

However, just how many moving parts there were in this book was probably the greatest drawback. There was always so much going on that the individual character arcs didn’t feel like they were given enough room to breathe. Also the flow of time made the relationships that were developed feel sort of rushed. From the three parts it was Destry’s story that I was most engaged with because the direction of the plot and her character development was the clearest.

That’s not to say that the other characters weren’t good because I was very much invested in the welfare of the various individuals we meet across the whole book, they just didn’t stand out much on their own.

All in all this is an admirable book that both has a cosy feel to it but is also one that gives the reader much to think about. Definitely one to check out if you’re a fan of the work of Kim Stanley Robinson in terms of themes and Becky Chambers in terms of characters.
Final Rating - 3.5/5 Stars

If you asked me what this book was about I would not be able to tell you beyond the overarching theme of environmentalism vs. capitalism. I had no idea where the story was going from one chapter to the next and not in a good way.

"The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz is a captivating, thought-provoking novel that explores the complex and timely issues of environmentalism and corporate greed.
The details of the world are rich and immersive, with a strong sense of world-building that makes the reader feel as if they are a part of the story. The themes of the novel, such as the ethics of creating sentient beings for specific tasks, the conflict between corporations and the workers they own (and exploit), and the importance of environmental preservation, are expertly woven into the narrative. Because we jump in time a few times, the main characters change, but each time they are well-developed and relatable, making the reader care about their journey and their fight for justice. The novel is also very-well researched, weaving in intriguing challenges of intercity transportation systems, geophysics and new social structures balancing new life forms, but without overwhelming the reader.
Overall, "The Terraformers" is a must-read for fans of science fiction and anyone interested in exploring the themes of ethics, morality, sustainability, and the future of space exploration.

3,5 stars

Ever since I first heard of The Terraformers I was super excited for it. What the synopis hinted at and the cover seemed to be exactly up my alley. Unfortunately there were quite a few things that completely threw me and I had not expected.

Lets start with the fact that this is not a continous story as I expected but three stories that were interconnected with quite big time jumps between them. And while there was always a connection from the previous stories there was a learning curve for what had happened in the time in between. Everytime i felt like I was very settled into the story and characters, we would switch. I would have loved to have spend more time with some of these characters and their lives, especially with story 2.

I also really had to get used to the personification of animals and inanimate objects. Flying moose that can talk, intelligent naked mole rats and flying trains. It just didn't feel quite so fitting when I started reading this story.

Having said that I did love the concept and all the ideas. The idea of how this planet was terraformed, the consequences of their experimentations with the human body and animals and the moral questions. There is still a lot there left to discover and I certainly would not mind revisiting this world.