mihono.moe
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book review: the terraformers (newitz, 2023)
from 2025-02-16
by hexeaktivitat
really wanted to like this a lot more than I ended up liking it.
it's not bad by any stretch. there's a lot that's interesting inside this book: from smaller concepts, like the organic living buildings and a group of worms solving the traveling merchant problem, to larger ones, like the tendency for history to fade into mythology and the contrast of self-governance to corporate colonialism. the big one (and probably the most compelling argument to check it out) is the way the setting sets out equal standing for hominids and other species; the ability of technology in the setting to create a continuous wireless communication network between members of different species, along with the emphasis on granting all species autonomy and rights, is probably the most compelling reason to read the book. even past that, there's clearly a lot of Ideas here, and they're all, individually, good Ideas to be working with.
the problem for me set in partway through the first part of the book. the pacing felt tremendously off -- events moving so fast I felt like I barely had time to process a variety of character actions that seemed to lurch suddenly to villany. it wasn't until I hit the first timeskip between part 1 and part 2 that I realized that the book was a generational saga.
part 2 was more coherent (I would not be surprised to learn that the second portion of the book was some of the earliest written material) but suffered from the same pacing structure as part 1: a lesiurely tour through a lot of interesting locales until the plot needs to resolve and characters abruptly jaunt halfway across the planet before you have a chance to think about it.
part 3 had a lot of the most interesting and fascinating concepts in the whole book to this point: for instance, there's a discursion at a game jam in an underground bar where the main POV character (a train, which is honestly kinda sick) rifles through a bunch of historical data in an inscrutable video game while two other characters bicker about game design. it's a genuinely fascinating bit of history about the setting that hadn't ever really been touched on before then -- the fact that there are no records of the origin of the Environmental Rescue Team and that its originators exist primarily as legal documents and vague ideas of concepts. and yet after a few pages of this we're bundled back into the plot vehicle (in this case, literally) and off to another digression on something else. it's not even until I write this that I realize there's the entire possibility that humans in this setting are entirely artificial, the originals annihilated in the anthropocene and only kept around as genetic templates by robots or species that came after us.
the end result of all the rush is that rather than feeling like a complete generational saga that wrestles with its big themes of environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, and self-determination over the course of centuries, it feels like a collection of ideas about what a generational saga like that would look like, and a guided tour over the crucial elements of such a narrative. it's not a dealbreaker if the characters don't get a tremendous amount of development in a book like this, but to simultaneously shortsell the setting when it embodies the core themes is disappointing. I want to say it would work refigured as a trilogy; I worry that there just isn't enough substance inside each of the three parts to merit such an expansion. it could very definitely have used a couple hundred more pages, just to let the pace settle down and focus on something for longer.
the terraformers is worth a read for the relatively strong vision it sets out for a universe where hominids and other species share equal rights and standing and commuincate with each other, and the optimism for people's capacity to push back against corporate capitalism and colonialism is really sorely needed now even more than when it was published. everything else never quite gets the time it needs to shine.