3 stars out of 5

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately this book just wasn’t for me. I was really excited to read it, but it just didn’t meet my expectations. It did bring up a lot of really interesting concepts and ideas about society, such as what we class as a ‘person’, and how we determine the intelligence of these people ect.

I felt that when reading I kept turning pages and just not getting anywhere.I know I read faster than average, and my kindle said I’d finish it in 5 hours. Brilliant I thought. But then I sat down to read, and 14 hours later my kindle said I had 4.5 hours left. Weird. So I look at the clock and a mere 30 minutes has passed. This book was incredibly slow to me, and I think it may have been down to my lack of investment in the plot. Whilst the premise was really intriguing, the execution just wasn’t hitting the spot.

The characters were pretty good, but I felt that too many were introduced in a short time, and with lots of them not being human (naked mole rat for example), I had a hard time keeping them all in my head and was often confused about who a particular character was. This wasn’t helped with the constant time jumps (talking hundreds of years here), which meant that just as you were settling into the story and understanding what was happening, you’d be whooshed into the future and have to start all over again.

From other reviews of people who also got an arc of this book, there seems to be a pretty mixed bag of ratings, so I do definitely recommend giving it a read as I can see how you could enjoy it, but also don’t be surprised if you dislike it, it seems you wouldn’t be the only one.

The Terraformers is out today, 02/02/2023.

Tl;dr Holy vomit-streaked burning compost heap, Batman! Grating prose and didactic plotting keep down abundant good intentions and some interesting ideas in this hope-punk descendant of Red Mars and Walkaway. 2.5/5, rounded up but I could easily be argued down.

———————

Does anybody still remember Rings of Power from, uh, a couple months ago? The worst people on the Internet hated it for the worst possible reasons, it was reassuringly expensive, and the stills looked to have been plucked from some of most beloved mainstream films of the last few decades. But it just wasn’t, you know, very good. Some solid moments, Morfydd was a star, but not enough to outweigh po-faced ponderousness and inelegant writing.

Now, Annalee Newtiz's The Terraformers isn’t a multi-billion-dollar white whale, but wastes its considerable potential just the same. Newitz is of course nerd royalty, having provided years of on-point prose to (old-school) io9 and Ars Technica, and they seem just the right voice for a self-proclaimed optimistic epic like this one. So why did I finish it so deflated?

There are a lot of easy, partial answers. There's plenty to nitpick if you’re so inclined, from mindbogglingly fast terraforming rates (0-to-60 oxygenation in 10ky using just cyanobacteria?) to weirdly inconsistent ecology (the ecosystem is so fragile in the first chapter that the carbon from a single body is a problem, but large populations and extensive orbital transfers are just dandy a few hundred years later) and handwavy physics (in this green, low-impact society it's trivial to get the power to...melt fresh faults into the crust in literal minutes?). But to be fair, Newitz isn't aiming for technical accuracy per se, just scientific aesthetics, which is true of almost all speculative fiction. Their contemporary flourishes can be similarly jarring; Terraformers describes a childless society on remote Sask-E in the grim brightness of the fifty-first millennium, but it's clearly about the present day, playing out West Coast Discourse around carbon, gentrification, housing and identity in a way that’s instantly familiar to anyone even slightly Online. But I can’t really condemn that without doing in say, The Lathe of Heaven either. So why is it still so unsatisfying?

In the end it’s not the tropes, it’s the craft, which took out of the novel every few pages. Characters say things like “Now let’s do what the Environmental Rescue Team does best. Let’s gather data from the environment.” without a flicker of self-awareness. Newitz’s simple, often jovial prose style keeps everything is comprehensible but flattens scenes of brutal devastation, awkward trips to the game cafe, and corporate showdowns into a barely-differentiated mass of short descriptive sentences. Characters say they’re filled with rage, but it’s a conveniently tidy fury that doesn’t affect their actions in the slightest. Our heroes are gifted a truly earth-shattering Chekhov’s gun in the first act and yet there is absolutely zero tension about it ever going off. There are flying mounts straight out of a MMORPG. Band-aid-centric sexytimes (you see, the band-aids are so Space Mom can’t find out our, uh, grown-ass adult characters are knocking boots, because reasons?). New swear words that land with a leaden thump. Is this actually a YA novel and I didn’t notice?

It’s a pity, because there are some intriguing and humane ideas here, from a wonderfully elastic idea of “people” to an incisive critique of “back to nature” fantasies, and I appreciate Newtiz’s intent to provide genuine uplift without flinching from real problems. It’s just all a bit didactic and clunky, and that’s before we even get into things like the nearly inexplicable third-act revelation about exactly whose (cloned) H. sapiens bodies are being used to despoil the native soil of this deracinated American West. In a more nuanced work, that reveal might have been a bitter commentary on the indignities inflicted on a brutalised people, or even just a supreme irony. But here? I expected better.

Many thanks to Little, Brown Books and Annalee Newitz for the advanced copy of The Terraformers via NetGalley, in return for my honest and unbiased review. Quick note: I don’t recap plots in my reviews, as it’s easy enough to read the book’s synopsis and blurbs, I purely focus on my feelings & opinions of how the books makes me feel.

The Terraformers is a collection of three short stories/novellas about the same planet (Sask-E) over the course of thousands of years.

I was really looking forward to this book, as planetfall and terraforming are some wheelhouse topics for me: they really hook me into a story.

Sadly, I found it really difficult to get into the book, especially after the first story. There is a lot of detail in each story, much of which feels – frankly – superfluous. From highly detailed information on the routes of a river to excruciatingly dragged out political machinations and infighting, the avalanche of information goes on for pages and pages. Whilst it’s surely interesting, it seems to have nothing to do with the actual plot, and it actually just detracts from it.

My attention waned the longer it went on and I really grew to just dislike it, there was just too much unnecessary information for me. Which was really sad as I was so looking forward to it!

Moods: challenging, informative, reflective
Pace: slow
Character development: weak
Plot or character driven: plot
Diversity: high
Trigger warnings: Ableism, Death of a family member

Rating 2/5

In some distant time and place out in the universe, the commercial terraforming of planets is a centuries-long process overseen by Environmental Rescue Teams. The ERT are concerned with stability and gentle nurturing of the environment in a holistic approach that is almost always at odds with the commercial entities who own not just the planet, but – as far as they’re concerned – every lifeform upon it.

This would include Destry, a vat-grown humanoid ultra-designed for the job she has, from ability to ‘read’ environmental data from the planet’s networks to a vastly extended lifespan. And her ‘mount’, a semi-robotic moose who communicates via sophisticated text messaging – and who can fly. Urm?

From an intriguing concept and strong enough start, that early reveal of Whistle – the moose – and all of his abilities was like whiplash. This is a sci-fi novel, isn’t it? With… talking, flying, moose? What on – or off – Earth?! There is some ‘sciencing’ behind it all, but frankly the whole thing threw me out of the story almost immediately, making everything else a huge uphill struggle. Why a moose? I mean, why not, but also if there is tech that lets him fly, why not just apply that directly to the humanoid character? Or, stick with non-sentient transport? It was just such an odd choice, and not one I ever liked.

Trying not to let that overshadow the rest of the story, it was unfortunately one of good and not so good bits. I’ve seen it described as ‘hopepunk’ – sci fi with a more positive feel (and the opposite of ‘grimdark’). I’m down for some hope, I really am, but it didn’t really work for me here. The characters are all so nice (or, the few totally pantomime-level nasty) and so pro-environment and inclusive and all that (all great things, don’t get me wrong), that to be honest they just came out as very flat, and somewhat naïve. It took me a long time not to find them all sounding a little bit, well, stupid, frankly. It didn’t quite reach the level of “Hello friend, you appear to have misplaced your knife in my abdominal area. Here it is” but it felt close.

It also doesn’t help that the book is really three linked novellas, each jumping ahead significant chunks of time. So, the characters you try to relate to in the first part are suddenly long dead as we move on centuries. It’s a little unavoidable given the millennia-spanning task of terraforming a planet, but it was a little jarring.

Plot-wise there’s plenty to like, with our main characters discovering an underground city that shouldn’t exist. There’s a lot of conflict between these representatives of nature, and the corporate overlords, explored on several levels. By the end, this was a really enjoyable thread, watching politics start to shift against those valuing profit over life. But, perhaps a little too late, or at the very least not quite strong enough to overcome the weirdness of talking, flying animals and sentient trains, or the many little elements that sort of touched on big themes, but didn’t quite do much with them. Mostly, the mix of the fantastical just didn’t gel for me with the sci-fi stuff.

Really, I wanted to enjoy this book a *lot* more than I did. The writing is great, the overall ideas are intriguing and well conceived, but somehow it didn’t fit together for me and rather failed to capture my imagination – which perhaps just isn’t quite evolved enough for it all ;)

The Terraformers is, I think, Newitz's first book for several years and it is really good to see a new work from this author. It is an excellent of example of all that SF can be at its best - challenging, laden with breathtaking ideas, and epic in scale and conception (though in this case not length - it's refreshing to meet a book with a span of centuries and a planetary scale narrative that is not a trilogy).

Set some 60,000 years in the future, The Terraformers considers our future at a time when "people" have spread far and wide across the universe. Post the "Great Bargain" other forms of life than humanity - animals and plants, as well as various AIs, bots and hybrids of bio, tech and AI - qualify as "people" and are entitled to a say in how things are run. This activity is overseen by "Environmental Rescue Teams", ERTs, whose focus is ecology, but more than that - one might almost say theirs is the science, or perhaps the engineering, of community, in the broadest possible sense.

So this book is filled with lifeforms designed, or engineered, for particular purposes - H. Sapiens may assume they are the default, the template, but they can be designed to be ultra-receptive to networks, or reworked as H. Varialis to breathe atmospheres of carbon and nitrogen. We meet sentient, flying moose, intelligent cows with bionic legs, and a cat reporter who forms a friendship with a flying train. Newton's audacious concepts only sound bizarre out of context: in the story they arise as almost inevitable in this future, and not just as technological maybes but as actual, living, feeling and suffering - well, people, which is the point, I think.

Troublingly for a future in which such a bewildering array of life is given a voice, and one in which there is radical acceptance of individuals (Newitz presents a variety of genders and all manner of romantic connections) economic and social inequality is as bad as ever, or perhaps worse. Corporates are able to, literally, build and own people, burning in rules to keep those people in their place. The Terraformers is about, among other things, how that process - built on the rock of private ownership - comes to be challenged.

Structured as three episodes taking place over several centuries we see the development of a new planet, Sask-E, in its early days a "pristine" wilderness (only, not really), some time later with cities are being established, and then, in the third part, as those cities fall under the control of a particularly unpleasant corporate overlord pandering to a strain of H. Sapiens genetic particularity. Each time, it's ingenuity, solidarity and daring that saves the day, though most of the characters we meet don't overlap between the parts, even though these are recognisably stories of the same communities. (I was reminded rather of Asimov's earliest Foundation stories, visiting the same polity at interesting times during a long evolution, although the imaginative leaps here are much greater and the science social as much as physical).

The accent is, then, on people (of wide and diverse types) confronting "problems" - environmental, political and developmental - their interventions then being allowed to run and the results presented centuries later. A risk with such a structure could be that really, we're just being given a kind of animated history: Newitz pushes back on that by making the main characters gloriously, passionately real, giving then lives, loves and involvements that both illuminate and transcend the development of the plot. Indeed, one senses that at some levels, aspects of these people have complicated, rather than facilitated, the author's plotting - but also that at another, they are the perfect illustration of a thesis that the future is diverse, and that it needs to be diverse. The "plot" therefore accommodates variety of both forms and opinions and apparent drawbacks of that - the awkwardness of decision making in the ERTs, for example - are really strengths.

It's a complex, thought-provoking and engaging book. Though I think it won't be for everyone - the story telling is in a very particular style and often the viewpoint characters are far form driving the plot - it's a style that grew on me and that really pays off, suiting both the setting of the book and the duracxtion of the storyline. And behind that, Newitz really is a clever and accomplished storyteller, giving us something genuinely different and ultimately breathtaking.

Wonderful reading.

I appreciate receiving an ARC of this book (thanks to NG and the publisher!) but ended up wishing I never did. I've been trying to come up with an objective and constructive review of this book, but realized I'm wasting even more time on the book with that than I already did.
Instead here's a short and subjective comment (skip it if you want something more costructive). This was weird, and odd, and while it had some ambitious and interesting ideas, I found it was all executed poorly. The division into three parts was strange, and I think this book would have worked better if they were separate books, making this a trilogy of loosely connected novellas instead of a single novel. As it was, it just ended up being sloppy and difficult to get into (honestly, I could not connect to a single character or plot point, simply put they were all just flat and boring).
Ultimately this book just really kind of sucked and was one of the most unenjoyable books I've read. If it's on your TBR, I recommend checking out content warnings for the book before picking it up. I'm sure there will be people who appreciate this book, but I'm not one of them.

DNF @ 25%
The trouble with literary fiction x speculative fiction books is that they are either a hit or a miss. I was very excited to get into The Terraformers, it sounded like everything I love in a book. However, the info-dumping was relentless even after 9 whole chapters. Maybe I was more invested in the time jump, but that didn't seem to be happening any time soon. The idea and concept are amazing (talking flying moose, I mean who would hate that?!), it;s just the execution that sorely misses the points. Perhaps it gets better after a while, but I made only one New Year's Resolution in 2023, and that was to dnf books if they didn't seem interesting.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown Book Group UK for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz comes out 31/01/23.
The review on my blog goes online 30/01/23

I adored this one. It hurt me more than once though! I look forward to the day that machines are sentient and ready to hurl insults at each other just because they can xD
The book starts out with Destry, an ERT ranger in charge of keeping the balance on Sask-E, a planet that is being terraformed for human habitation. While investigating an oddity near a volcano, they come across a whole civilization of their predecessors from hundreds of years ago. Together they try to carve out a space for this city on a planet that is more or less owned by a corporation.
In the second part, we skip several centuries into the future and follow Sulfur, who has to go on a trip with a Verdance employee to survey what public transit system would serve the planet best.
In the third part, we follow Sulfur’s kid, again, quite a bit of a jump into the future, and see the situation on the planet go from bad to worse.

The book is sectioned into three parts, and you spend time with a different set of people in each. So you get attached to one set, the part ends, and you only ever hear about them or see them very occasionally :/ I was very upset about a character nearly dying in part 1, and very worried about virtually all of them in part 3, because this book definitely felt like it had no issue killing off people if it served the story.
The world-building is excellent. We have several species of humans on the planet, animals who have been pulled into what’s called “The Great Bargain” which made them capable of speech and gave them rights as a person, and sentient machines. On the flipside, some corporations go against that by limiting certain individuals. These are either mounts, like Destry’s friend Whistle, a moose, who has limited options to express himself, or “Blessed” which can only talk about the job they have, for example we meet a chef, and they can’t text or talk about anything that does not relate to cooking or groceries. Another character describes their existence as simple and blissful, but we know from interactions with other limited individuals that these people still have all the thoughts and feelings of a person, they just can’t express them. This novel goes dark places in regards to ethics and rights.
I adore the uncomplicated depiction of relationships for all the characters we follow. They love who they love, and nobody has an opinion on any of it. Seems like the way to go, and not just because we have bigger things to worry about as a society.
The world reminds me of Altered Carbon. People can get extremely old, and porting into a new body is a thing, not just for robots. None of them seem to suffer the same thing as the rich in Altered Carbon: if you’ve experienced everything, what is there left for you to do? We meet someone who’s over a thousand years old, and yet all they care about is getting recognition for their work. I’m not convinced the human mind is designed to live that long.
The novel has some humorous moments that are just adorable. Like a drone picking a fight with a door system that is still grumpy because it was stolen off a spaceship ages ago, like cats watching a human do striptease and wondering how those stretches could possibly be sexual.

Overall I think this is an amazing book and I can only recommend you read it.

I don't know what happened between me and "The Terraformers". The core is excellent, the use of language is brilliant, and the setting is exciting. It was just hard to connect with the characters and the story seemed to take a long time to get anywhere. And, yes, I found it all a little too complex with too little upfront explanations. Maybe a second read would fix that.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

Thank you Netgalley and Publisher for this advanced copy.

The Terraformers was unique novel, consisted with 3 great novellas. However, the 3 novellas didn't have the same good things. I found myself enjoying the first one than the rest of the stories

The Terraformers is three linked novellas in one, spanning a few hundred years of the terraforming of a planet. Newitz has stuffed this with lots of fun ideas which, like the best science fiction, has a lot to say about modern humanity (its particularly interested in self-hood and determinism as well as kicking capitalism - like the best science fiction). Like any nook without a consistent protagonist, it can feel a bit disjointed, particularly when the initial lead is so engaging. But it does manage to switch between the personal and the big idea stuff which meant that it was a more than solidly satisfying read. It certainly didn't hurt that the protagonist in the last third was a sentient train.

Its the far future, humanity has sprawled and private companies, playing the long game, and terraforming planets to carve up and sell as condos. Humanity itself has diversified, animals uplifted and humanity itself changed to suit various environments - they don't just Terraform for Earth-like. But on our planet, Sask-E, they are going for a pristine early Homo Sapiens friendly environment. Destry (on board from that name) works for the Environmental Rescue Team, nurturing and developing it and making sure nothing upsets it (there is a tech-bro encounter early on that sets the scene). All of this is being done for big business though, and as we see later once the land is being sold, and the people move in, everything is likely to change, particularly when she discovers a whole different set of Terraformers who have been there before and aren't so keen on the green world being set up.

Its true that as the three sections go, the middle bit isn't quite as strong as the first and last (though contains the best politics). But its never not compelling, it is just you jump from lava-flowing catastrophe to the politics of public transport systems (it does pull you along with that surprisingly well). Throw in some flying sentient mooses, some conversations about autonomous government and a full-blown breakdown of capitalist hiring and near indentured labour policy which feels like the Qatar World Cup, this is the kind of fun idea-popping book I would want from Newitz..

In the Acknowledgements for her latest book The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz thanks Kim Stanley Robinson. Science fiction fans will recognise Robinson as the creator of the ambitious Mars terraforming trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). Those books set a template for hard science fiction, detail heavy books which often eschewed character and plot for extensive detail on microbial oxygen generation and later debate over the Martian constitution. In The Terraformers, Newitz has taken this approach (and included a character called Kim) and added her own thematic concerns – sentience and artificial intelligence (dealt with in some detail in her debut Autonomous), the amorality of big business (also Autonomous) and sexuality and identity (The Future of Another Timeline).
The Terraformers is essentially three connected novellas set on the planet Sask-E. The book opens with planetary engineer Destry encountering a rich dilettante seeking to reconnect with his ancestral roots in her pristine forest environment. It turns out that the company that Destry works for, and which owns Sask-E (and has essentially financed the centuries-long terraforming effort), has been marketing the planet with views to selling parts of it to wealthy investors. Plans are thrown into disarray when Destry discovers a hidden community on the planet which seeks her help. The second story takes place 600 years later and involves two characters plotting out the best form of public transport for the planet’s new cities. And the third takes place yet another 600 years later in a time of some political upheaval and revolves around a sentient flying train and a sentient journalist cat.
The Terraformers explores some interesting theoretical and philosophical territory but is much more interested in nuts and bolts than in delivering a thoroughly engaging narrative. There is an ongoing story involving corporate greed and malfeasance and the battle for rights of sentient robots and animals. But much of the grist of this book involves questions of how to safely divert a river or what is the best way to deliver a public transport system or how various different types of sentient beings form relationships or the implementation of a 600 year old treaty.
All of which is to say that The Terraformers is interesting without being terribly engaging. And there are a few philosophical holes in the middle of it. Firstly – if the terraforming has only happened because a corporation funded it why should the corporation then not be able to profit from that investment? Secondly, for all of Destry’s initial desire to keep the environment pristine, pretty soon even the non-corporate development pressure must have a pretty significantly on the planet’s environment which is never directly addressed.
There is always a balance in harder science fiction between making the future detailed and believable and telling a good story. As Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy went on, and the detail mounted, the narrative tended to move from the latter to the former. The Terraformers suffers in a similar way, with its most engaging story being the first one of the three, when the rules are necessarily a little looser.
Despite the caveats there is still plenty to enjoy in The Terraformers. There is plenty to chew on both philosophically and thematically with real world relevance beyond the extreme futuristic setting. And Newitz brings a sense of wonder and joy to the narrative which carries over to all of her characters.

The Terraformers thrilled me with its imagination and creative ideas. Three interconnected novellas give readers a glimpse into the world of the future and the inner workings of terraforming. The world is fantastic! The plot, on the other hand, not so much. I felt that the world-building and ideas overshadowed the characters and story.

All in all, it's hard to love The Terraformers, but impossible not to appreciate it.

He leído muchas de las obras que ha publicado Annalee Newitz, tanto en ficción como en no ficción y siempre las había disfrutado en mayor o menor medida. Por eso ha sido bastante decepcionante encontrarme con The Terraformers, con una historia que a priori parecía interesante pero con la que no he conseguido conectar en ningún momento.


La idea de que en un futuro bastante lejano la terraformación de planetas sea una inversión a muy largo plazo es indudablemente original. Newitz la aprovecha para hacer una crítica al capitalismo y propugnar el valor de lo público, algo que también es muy en su línea. Pero la forma de hacerlo es plana y aburrida, con unos personajes que no consiguen atraer la atención del lector en ningún momento y con un maniqueísmo bastante exagerado.

El caso es que las ideas son muy interesantes, como el tratamiento de los monómeros para prolongar la vida de los terraformadores a muchos siglos salvando de este modo el enorme plazo inherente a este tipo de labores. La sociedad creada, con habitantes que se “decantan” modificando su ADN para adaptarse a cada necesidad es también atractiva, pero le autore se pierde un poco en su búsqueda de la igualdad entre los personajes, ya sean Homo Sapiens, Homo Diversus, trenes voladores, vacas modificadas o lombrices de tierra que resuelven algoritmos (prometo que no me estoy inventando nada, todos aparecen en el libro con un papel más o menos relevante).

Quizá lo más interesante del libro sea la creación de The Great Bargain, una revolución ocurrida en el pasado lejano en la Tierra en la que lo que hasta entonces se consideraban animales entran a formar parte de lo que se considera un ser sintiente e inteligente, con las modificaciones necesarias para poder comunicarse con los demás y expresar sus opiniones. Sinceramente, me dejó muy descolocada desde el principio este concepto, porque supone cambiar totalmente todas nuestras ideas preconcebidas sobre qué es inteligencia.

Como decía, los conceptos e ideas con los que trabajo Newitz son atractivos y originales, pero la ejecución es demasiado trabada y muy plana. Al contrario que Kim Stanley Robinson, quizá una de las grandes referencias a la hora de plantear nuevos sistemas, Newitz no profundiza en los aspectos más técnicos, pero es que tampoco lo hace en los aspectos éticos, quedándose en una tierra de nadie que me ha dejado indiferente y aburrida. No puedo recomendar el libro, aunque me gustaría que alguna persona que lo haya leído y disfrutado me hiciera ver qué es lo que ha valorado más, porque yo he sido incapaz.

I read an eARC of this book on Net Galley so thank you to Net Galley, the author and the publisher for allowing this.

This book is a really clever exploration of Terraforming. It takes place over hundreds of years on a planet called Sask-E. The book is set thousands of year in the future so there’s huge advancements in technology and bodies can be grown and augmented.

This book started off really well, I found Destry’s section really fascinating. Destry is a ranger protecting the planet while it terraforms. They come across a tourist in a H.Sapien body, illegally harming the environment and killing and eating local fauna. She is forced to take action to protect the planet, however this earns her backlash from Verdance who are the company that are terraforming the planet. They’re looking to monetise the planet through giving people an authentic historical earth experience.

I really enjoyed Destry’s section but I got a bit lost after that. The book jumps forward in time quite a bit and sometimes without warning. There are also a lot of characters and I struggled at times to follow who people were and what species they were. Because of the advances in technology people include animals that has been created with advanced intelligence and bots. There’s so much variety in species and so many different characters that there were times that I was getting confused and couldn’t picture the characters. This wasn’t a problem in Destry’s section but once it moved to Misha, I did get a bit lost.

I loved the world building in this, it was so clever. The technology created for terraforming was really interesting. I liked the structure of the ERT rangers trying to protect the planet and the conflict with the growing greed of Verdance. There is discussion around exploitation. Verdance built the rangers and therefore consider them property. However these are highly intelligent beings. There’s also discussion around enslavement. The company believes they own everything they build, however these are sentient beings. These were advancing themes throughout the book that built conflict as the population of the planet swells. This was one of the most interesting themes of the book and the way the author wove together all the threads they’d laid at the end was excellent.

There’s so much to like in this book, it’s wonderfully imaginative and clever. It only fell down a little for me as there was so much packed into it I struggled to follow at times.