The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

[This review was originally posted on my blog earlier this week. I’ve also reviewed Newitz’s previous two science fiction novels: Autnonomous (2017) right here as part of my Political History of the Future series, and The Future of Another Timeline (2019) at Strange Horizons.]

If nothing else, points for truth in advertising. Newitz’s third and most ambitious novel is, as its title lets on right from the start, an entry in the subgenre that is perhaps most closely associated with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The tale of transforming a world, full to the bursting with ideas, stretching into deep time, peopled by nerdy scientists and engineers earnestly debating the best way to turn an inhospitable landscape into a place where humans can live and thrive. Fittingly for a novel coming to us from well into the twenty-first century, however, Newitz adds a wrinkle to this plot that Robinson and others have tended to leave out: the impact of capitalism, and corporatism, on how new worlds are shaped, and who gets to live in them.

The setting is the year 59,000, in a post-human society bound together by the Great Bargain—the uplifting of various animal species, including moose, cows, cats and many others, alongside the creation of sentient AIs and robots. Humans themselves are more engineered than biological in this period, and possessed of a wide range of exotic traits, the umbrella term for which is H. diversus. Even plain old H. sapiens, however, are significantly altered from the familiar baseline, designed from templates and grown in vats, with lifespans that stretch to centuries. Interplanetary travel is achieved through personality transfer into an appropriate body—which is perhaps our first hint that terraforming, in this novel, is not merely about landscape and environment.

On the planet Sask-E, privately owned by a corporation which is terraforming it with the intention of selling it to developers, specially-grown rangers and scientists are hard at work getting the planet ready for human habitation. Destry, an environmental specialist, is surprised to discover that her predecessors in the job, a subset of H. diversus engineered to survive in the planet’s original, oxygen-poor atmosphere, did not, after changing the air to be suitable for baseline humans, die of old age as they were expected to. Instead, they’ve founded an underground city, Spider, where they’ve been developing advanced technologies and experimenting with their own forms of genetic engineering. Spider’s inhabitants have come out of hiding to protest the rerouting of the river that waters their city. To Destry’s corporate masters, however, these people are squatters, and it’s left to her to broker a peace, carving out an exception to corporate ownership of Sask-E that gives Spider water rights in exchange for its residents’—known as H. Archaea, or Archaeans—volunteering some of their labor to assist in the planet’s terraforming and development.

Right off the bat, then, the novel establishes the awkward—and, to its readers, if perhaps not to its characters, extremely counterintuitive—tension between environmentalism and corporatism that exists in its far-future setting. The central narrative of the novel’s society is that the Great Bargain resolved the challenges and failures of the anthropocene by encouraging humans and their fellow sentients to live in balance with their environment and each other. But this broad humanism is often honored more in the breach than the observation. Even as its characters use a definition of “people” that readers may find wrongfooting—the default assumption of most characters, when encountering a living being, is to assume that it is a person—institutions and companies keep finding ways to define some sentients as non-people. Destry’s ranger corps includes animals classed as “mounts” because they have failed intelligence assessments. Later we discover that these assessments are self-fulfilling, the result of induced brain damage that limits the language abilities of such creatures. Before long, we meet humans who have been placed under the same restrictions, such as a chef who can only speak on matters relating to his work or to food preparation.

Another way of putting it is that capitalism has always sought to dehumanize workers, and one of the key points of The Terraformers is that it will continue to do this even under a system that claims to value equality and to cherish the personhood of all creatures. The same dynamic can be observed when it comes to the novel’s society’s affirmation of its environmental values. “Balance” is lauded as their highest goal by many of the corporate honchos overseeing Sask-E’s terraforming, but financial considerations always hold sway. In the novel’s opening chapter, Destry decisively sees off a human interloper in the region she’s overseeing, quoting rules about maintaining ecological balance and preventing contamination. Tellingly, Destry’s concern isn’t with keeping nature pristine, but with preserving the still-delicate systems that are transforming the planet into something Earth-like, which the visitor’s waste products were interrupting. Her argument is a practical one, which has at least one eye on Sask-E’s intended fate as real estate. In the next scene, however, Destry, like many technocrats before her, discovers that under capitalism practical considerations always take a back seat to short-term economic gain. The visitor, it turns out, represented a conglomerate interested in purchasing parts of the planet, and Destry is chastised for assuming that the rules apply to him.

Seven hundred years later, in the novel’s second segment, an Archaean named Sulfur teams up with Destry’s protégé, Misha, to perform an environmental impact assessment on various forms of proposed public transport. The core terraforming phase of the planet is now complete, and various companies have purchased regions, on which they are building cities. Misha’s corporate masters have a contractual obligation to link these cities with public transport, and he’s being pushed to recommend trains as the best possible solution.

Once again we see how the novel takes the popular present-day buzzwords of environmentalism (and now also urban planning) and reveals how they have been hollowed out by capitalism. The setting the novel proposes—urban centers surrounded by automated farmland and untouched wilderness, an emphasis on public rather than private transport—is exactly the way of life we’re currently being urged to aspire to (including in some of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent writing). But what Misha and Sulfur realize is that both Sask-E’s owners, and the companies developing its cities, are using these buzzwords as a blind. They are pushing trains with an unsuitable layout in the hopes that this will discourage intercity transit, locking residents and tourists into the corporate economy of one location.

Sulfur and Misha are able to forestall this fate by using Spider’s genetic engineering capabilities to create a new lifeform, a fleet of sentient people-carriers who traverse the planet on routes determined by customers’ needs. (That the novel decries trains in favor of self-driving vehicles may be seen as another way in which it seeks to undermine our reflexive response to certain buzzwords in the urban planning sphere, but it is nevertheless not entirely convincing.) Nine hundred years later, in the novel’s final segment, one of these carriers, Scrubjay, welcomes aboard a cat with the confusing name of Moose, a journalist who is investigating the growing housing crisis on Sask-E. Before long, the duo discover a corporate plot to push out—in some cases, with extreme violence—the animal, AI, and non-standard human residents of Sask-E’s cities in favor of incoming colonists. (In keeping with the novel’s ironic use of environmentalism, Scrubjay observes, of a displaced persons’ camp established by some of these refugees, that it doesn’t violate social norms because it is carbon-neutral.)

One point that The Terraformers keeps returning to is the obsession that Sask-E’s owners, developers, and ultimate residents have with an “authentic” experience of nature and human existence. The justification for pushing out non-H. sapiens from Sask-E’s cities is that the planet has been sold as an exact Pleistocene recreation, a return to the natural balance that this far future society claims to be seeking. And yet what we repeatedly learn is that this is little more than marketing-speak. As Destry points out, the Sask-E Pleistocene in fact incorporates elements from several of Earth’s geological eras, the better to suit the planet’s conditions and the image its marketers want to promote. A late plot development reveals that the genetic stock from which all the planet’s residents grew their bodies was taken from an old Earth museum which held genetic samples of Indigenous Americans. The corporate honcho who made the decision, we’re told, took this to mean “Indigenous human”, which suited Sask-E’s marketing scheme. More than this, however, it is a way of locking Sask-E’s eventual inhabitants into a licensing contract for their own bodies, while parroting slogans about balance and environmental purity.

In various methods, then, The Terraformers explores the ways in which terraforming is also social engineering, and vice versa. Like their planet, the novel’s characters are constructed, often to a specific purpose—Destry is able to link to sensors spread out over the planet, gaining a holistic view of its environmental health; Misha has the same ability, but enhanced to an intensity that causes him physical pain. The equanimity with which the characters accept such treatment—accept being, essentially, owned, with no say in who they work for or what work they do—speaks to the way that Newitz has twisted the Robinson-ian template to their own purposes.

Though many of its events and worldbuilding details could only be described as dystopian, The Terraformers is told in what might be described as a cozy tone. Its characters are cheerful and friendly, open to new experiences, and comfortable in their surroundings. The novel’s plot runs through excursions to nightclubs, gaming nights, and several sweetly described romances. No one here seems to suffer from the kind of anxiety we’ve come to associate with SFnal stories about capitalism taken to its illogical conclusion—on the contrary, even characters who are, by any reasonable definition, enslaved seem to possess an enviable degree of freedom to pursue their own interests and projects. Until they’re brought up short, as when Destry is informed that a condition for the peace treaty with Spider is that she will never be allowed to live there, or when Sulfur and Misha, who have fallen in love, recognize that they will only be able to pursue a relationship in between Misha’s copious obligations to his corporate masters. Even then, though, the response is a cheerful willingness to make do. When Sask-E’s owners start dispossessing its non-H. Sapiens residents, they quickly form their own communities, with communal food tents, work details to figure out things like housing, waste disposal, and education, and before long, restaurants and clubs. 

The Terraformers‘s terraformers are exactly the sort of characters you might remember form Red Mars and its sequels—knowledgeable, thoughtful, interested in systems and in the complex ways of affecting them. The more time one spends with these characters, however, the more one notices an insipid streak running through them all. The coziness of the novel’s tone starts to feel a little deceptive, a little too incongruous with what we’re actually seeing. There is something profoundly childish about these people, who, even as they commit acts of rebellion, fall in love with people they shouldn’t, and come up with ways to trick their corporate masters, never quite seem to grasp the extent of their dehumanization. They’re too quick to accept the limitations of their world, too unquestioning of the ways in which they have been designed and designated for a task. The cool heads and lack of sensationalism we’re used to seeing from Robinson’s characters start to seem like a character flaw in Newitz’s hands, as their heroes placidly accept the fundamental injustice on which their society is founded.

Descriptive as it was, then, The Terraformers‘s title is also deceptive. What the novel is ultimately about is the way that we are all—from corporate officers to wage slaves with deliberately hobbled speech centers—shaped by our environment, and by the decisions that went into making that environment, long before we were born. How, from a distance of time, those decisions come to seem, not just inevitable, but invisible. When Destry first meets the Archaeans, they are deeply hostile towards H. sapiens, blaming them for stealing and poisoning their planet. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the people responsible for altering Sask-E’s atmosphere were their own ancestors, acting on corporate orders. That the real injustice lies in creating people for the sole purpose of rendering their own world unlivable to them. When Sulfur proposes creating sentient trains, Misha recoils, terrified that the result will be genetic slavery, creatures designed to want to serve others. Almost a millennium later, Scrubjay seems to bear out this fear. Uninterested in politics or the greater running of his world, he does his job and obsesses over online strategy games, to which his path-minimizing brain is naturally drawn. And yet Scrubjay is not an automaton. He’s capable of listening to others and learning different ways. Having teamed up with Moose, he is able to expand his horizons and come up with ways to break the corporate control over Sask-E.

If there’s a fundamental optimism to The Terraformers, it lies here, in the idea that even people in the grips of an exploitative system can find ways to shape it that give those who come after them a little more freedom, a few more choices. And that those people will, in turn, do the same, thinking seriously about the world that their choices will shape, and the lives that it will be possible to live in it. It’s a happy ending, but one that is also touched with the same unease that inflects the rest of the novel. Scrubjay and Moose are able to find documentation that brings Sask-E into public ownership, and permits greater freedom for all its inhabitants. But what does it say about this society, that it permits wholesale slavery until the right legal loopholes are jumped through? Newitz has found a satisfying—but at the same time, deeply uncomfortable—middle ground between utopia and dystopia, one that is strongly reminiscent of the present day while still suggesting profound changes. The result is meaty, thought-provoking science fiction on a topic that has fallen a bit out of favor, but which feels achingly relevant as we ask ourselves how we want to shape our own world.