Reviews with content warning for Violence - The Terraformers

Futuristic sci-fi meets multi-generational family-ish saga meets climate crisis, with a three-part plot tracing three different generations of terraforming Environmental Rescue Team (ERT) engineers as they fight their planet's corporate owner and its greedy colonizing violence. A few key things that worked really well for me:

1) The structure. Short, fast-paced chapters within a clearly defined three-part story. This seems trivial, but I honestly felt like this accessible structure made it easy to follow the characters and the action and kept the plot moving. In each of the three parts we have a core cast (with connections between each generation) and an evolving picture of Sask-E, and because each generation has its own corporate obstacles, there is always a clear (and unique) central conflict.

2) The world-building. For as many creatures and constructs of human-level intelligence as there are in this story, it's surprisingly easy to get acclimated. A world in which "The Great Bargain" has determined which creatures can participate as equals in self-governance means a world in which a moose or a cow or an earthworm may be your partner in the field. I loved our wacky cast of characters, and appreciated that the moments of levity are counterbalanced with moments of uncomfortable reflection. Ideas of defining personhood and measuring intelligence reminded me of Martha Wells' Murderbot universe, as did the futuristic corporate-colonizing space-race.

3) The audio! There are so many implied/described sound effects in the story that are brought to life in the audiobook - Crisp and Hellfire's doubled speech, our various bots' conversational sound effects, the train song in part three (perhaps my favorite part of the entire story!). This narration elevated the reading experience for me (and I say this as a reader who generally has not enjoyed Graphic Audio productions that include sound effects).

I wouldn't consider this a sci-fi entry point for newer readers to the genre, but it is a thought-provoking and unique read for sci-fi fans!

Content Warnings

karlawaddles's review

Go to review page

adventurous hopeful inspiring slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

This book was riveting. It was not what I expected but the story was engaging and the multiple points of view were cleverly done. The world building was clearly intently researched (most of the acknowledgments were thanking various experts in a variety of fields). Probably could have been 3 books with how much went on, but it was satisfying to see the storyline build on each other.

Content Warnings

trankz's review

Go to review page

adventurous hopeful lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

Content Warnings

woolerys's review against another edition

Go to review page

hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

Writing - 4/5

Plot - 3/5

Characters - 5/5

Setting - 5/5

Genre - 4/5

Clarity/coherence - 3/5

Imagination - 5/5

TOTAL: 4.14

I felt unsettled and confused by how the world was constructed (everything is so engineered), but really enjoyed how it set the stage for such an expansive definition of "person" and how that figured into the story. It seemed to me (someone without much science education) that the science in the world-building was a mix of really accurate, specific things (eg atmospheric differences in the Archaen period vs Pleistocene) and really far-fetched, barely-sketched-out things (eg anti-gravity mesh). I loved all the characters and was always sad to leave one behind even as I was excited to meet a new one—the main characters change over the course of the book, which is divided into three parts that are each several hundred years apart. On the flip side, you get to see how a character’s legacy plays out over a longer time period, which was cool.

Content Warnings

schnaucl's review

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

This wasn't really what I was expecting. For some reason I was expecting a book about climate change (which is on me). Instead, this was a story about terraforming (...hence the title), colonialism, gentrification, class solidarity and the ravages of capitalism.

The most horrifying part to me was the constraints the corporations put on creatures with a low intelligence assessment except what a low rating really meant was that their brains were designed so that they physically couldn't verbalize other than what they were allowed. In the case of a mount, the limitation was polysyllabic words, in the case of a cook, it was anything not related to her job. They can still understand other words and concepts, but they couldn't verbalize them. It's discovered in the first book what the limitation does, and that it can be at least partially reversed and then it just...isn't? I get that it was possible because the mount was injured and in the course of treating him they were able to mitigate the limitation. But there's no real discussion about whether it might be possible to use the same technology even in the absence of a severe wound. The people with the artificial limiters can and do find ways around the limitation but it's exhausting.

I did like the concept of the minority getting one concession from the majority that the minority gets to specify when a vote is taken, although I feel like that only really works if there's agreement on why the minority is voting against the majority. And if everyone is operating in good faith, of course.

Content Warnings

jodean's review

Go to review page

adventurous dark hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

Newitz has created both my dream world and my worst nightmare. A future of amazing bioengineering capabilities, of any creature being sentient (including public transit??). Also a capitalist hellscape future where most people are "slaved" to a corporation?
The writing style is the only thing I can't get past. It's not my thing. But the premises were interesting enough that I had to keep reading.

Content Warnings

laurareads87's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous funny hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.25

The Terraformers is a story told in three parts, set years apart with only the slightest overlap in characters. The plot is set on Sask-E, a planet being terraformed to resemble a Pleistocene era Earth; it begins with the Environmental Rescue Team, whose members are working on the terraforming project. The second section follows a character trained by the protagonist of section one who is on a team strategizing for the development of inter-city transportation. The final section follows one of the sentient flying trains developed by this team as they and their allies work in hopes of creating a Sask-E for everyone rather than just for wealthy H sapiens.

What I liked: I quite liked the incorporation of multiple POVs using jumps in time period, and the incorporation of items like reports and transmissions into the text. I liked the exploration of speciesism & the world-building in which animals of all types are, in at least some contexts, meaningfully conceived of as persons. I like SFF that contrasts societies with dramatically different worldviews and that look at political decision-making as a process, and felt like this was handled well.

What I didn't love: I feel like there was very little ethical ambiguity in the characters, and that many (most) of the characters read as rather immature despite their lengthy lifespans. The antagonists at times felt like cartoon villains. Of the three, I found the middle section dragged on a bit and was less compelling than the other two.

Content warnings: violence, murder, animal death, human death, slavery, classism, war

Content Warnings

tigger89's review

Go to review page

adventurous hopeful tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I loved the grand scope of this book. Despite taking place over roughly 1,600 years, Newitz's choice to focus on three distinct, pivotal moments prevented the timeline from muddling together the way many long epics tend to. Each section of the book brought its own cast of characters — with a few crossovers — that still managed to feel loosely connected to each other through mentorship and family. In addition, the evolving maps(who saw that third one coming?) and subtly different narrative styles brought a different flavor to each of the three parts. If the idea of getting to know three different sets of characters in one novel seems daunting, perhaps think of it as reading three closely-connected novellas.

For the most part, I also found the characters to be a major strength. They do have a distinctly Becky Chambers vibe to them, though with variations on human and animal genomes rather than alien physiologies. This book has homo sapiens, neanderthal throwbacks, designer human genomes, robotic drones, sentient infrastructure, intelligent animals, collective beings, and many flavors of mechanical enhancement to biological bodies. The explorations of personhood were particularly intriguing, if horrifying when pushed to their inevitable conclusion under capitalism.

And yes, this is an extremely anti-capitalist book. In fact, if I'm going to point to anything as its flaw, it's probably related to that. Specifically, the two primary villains, the faces of the evil corporations, felt very one-dimensional to me. I'm someone who appreciates a nuanced villain. I see where Newitz did try to add some layers to the two of them, a cycle of revenge spanning hundreds of years, but ultimately it felt like their primary motivation to be evil was because they're part of a corporation, and didn't you know corporations are evil profit-suckers? I especially felt that the primary villain of the last section escalated from like 25% evil to 125% evil out of nowhere. I suppose it could have been a result of the 900-year time skip between sections two and three, in the sense that having so much time to stew might drive anyone to extremes. But there were other long-lived characters who didn't fall off the deep end while we weren't watching, so if that was Newitz's idea there(and I'm speculating, really), I think they needed to explore that contrast a little more in order to do those ladies justice.

This book has a number of LGBTQ(and probably some other letters that don't exist yet) characters, for those who are interested. Minor themes of chosen family might also be relevant to many readers. There are a few sexy scenes, skimmable if that's not your vibe. Nothing massively plot-relevant happens in them, just character development and curious physiology(I'm never going to look at a flower the same way again, there's knowing flowers are sexy and then there's knowing). All in all, I'd recommend the read. As I said before, parts of it feel cozy, but there's also a violence and sense of revolution to it that contrasts very nicely with the cozier parts. It also ends on a note that's undeniably hopeful, yet not saccharine.

Content Warnings

More...