Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
When I read the blurb, I thought this book would have an alien culture and the characters would have to reconcile and adapt to them. That didn't really happen.
I think there were some cool sci-fi things like giving animals and robots human-like intelligence. There were terrifying things like the Blessed. And things that ring true today with people being slaves to certain companies and immigration discrimination.
But, I wasn't able to really connect with the story. During what was supposed to be emotional epic moments, I just felt disconnected. Events were being told to me and I wasn't experiencing them.
So, overall, not terrible. Some cool and terrifying sci-fi concepts but this book is likely not going to super stick with me.
Side note as a sex-repulsed asexual person:Why do trains have to be horny? There was more sex and romance than I expected in this
I think there were some cool sci-fi things like giving animals and robots human-like intelligence. There were terrifying things like the Blessed. And things that ring true today with people being slaves to certain companies and immigration discrimination.
But, I wasn't able to really connect with the story. During what was supposed to be emotional epic moments, I just felt disconnected. Events were being told to me and I wasn't experiencing them.
So, overall, not terrible. Some cool and terrifying sci-fi concepts but this book is likely not going to super stick with me.
Side note as a sex-repulsed asexual person:
I almost did not finish ‘The Terraformers’ by Annalee Newitz because it is ultimately boring. I did finish it. The speculative technology is amazingly fun and innovative! But I was unaware the book would be changing almost all of the main characters every 100 pages, more or less. It was a little distressing when the characters I became attached to disappeared. I became less attached to the book, full stop.
Each of the three sections of the book, representing a progression of a thousand or so years passing and another generation of characters taking over the narration, showcased how a planet called Sask-E changed from an uninhabitable planet with the wrong kind of air for H. Sapiens to a thriving terraformed center of commerce with thousands of different lifeforms. I was reminded of The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (start here - [b:Red Mars|77507|Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660272828l/77507._SY75_.jpg|40712]).
Unfortunately for many readers, the novel is more of a 300-page tour about an imagined future of designed lab-grown lifeforms, sentient robots and amazing ‘green’ technology. The characters are interesting, but they are completely washed away in an ocean of extensive technological world-building. As a book of speculative science and technology, the novel is fantastic. As an engrossing novel of science fiction, the book sucks - unless a reader really wants to read what is primarily an overview of speculative body reshaping and how such technology might affect societies.
The three parts are:
-Settlers (year 59,006, mission - Ecosystem Maintenance)
-Public Works (59,706, mission - Survey for Intercity Transit)
-Gentrifiers (60,610, mission, Serve the Public)
Newitz shows how technology shapes the planet, politics and its people. Apparently, the politics isn’t very different from Earth’s real-life colonial history. And, as is the usual, the advanced technology, owned by those ‘Who Have’ politicians and business corporations, is used to abuse others. Some of the available tech controls some of the various populations mostly through physical limits on their intelligence, and by installing spying devices into their bodies. These sentient beings are ‘slaved’ to corporate bosses or rich owners. Free sentients, with their brains intact, are grown in the planet’s one free city, called Spider City. There are sentient trains, animals and robots. People are grown from manipulated gene stocks, with some populations being similar to Neanderthals. The Neanderthal-like individuals, part of an enormously varied group of people called H. Diversus, were designed to breathe and work on Sask-E while it was being terraformed. They now mostly live under a volcano in Spider City, where the old air of Sask-E is still used. After the initial terraforming was done by the Neanderthal-like beings, H. Sapiens, with their many different altered body forms depending on personal caprice, or their rented non-sentient robot bodies they are ported into, arrive. They now all work and live on Sask-E in most of its cities and farms along with a lot of sentient creatures and robots. Even earthworms have been given sentience.
Gentle reader, sentient earthworms could have been fun! But no. They aren’t given much to do in this novel.
The planet is considered a private entity since everyone and everything, at least those not from free Spider City, belongs to private enterprises. Each city is a separate competitor of the other cities similar to the city-states of the ancient Greeks, except governance is done by competing corporate interests.
By the third part, lower-class citizens in many of the cities, and everyone from Spider City, are seething because of the stranglehold on the planet by the corporations. Eventually, the elites begin evicting the less fortunate from their homes. The controlling corporations want to tear down the older communities of servants and workers and build more elite residential towers. Tent towns, which became necessary as a result, are being attacked and razed. Spider City is also being threatened from losing its status as free. A corporation wants to wipe it out and build a transport service where Spider City used to be.
Can Moose the journalist cat and Scrubjay the train stop the corporations, especially the rapacious robot human Cylindra, owner of the city Emerald?
This novel had a lot of possible joy in it, but I couldn’t find much beyond reading about amazing biological/mechanical critters. They have PG-16 sex! One scene. There is that….
It is a lot of fun to go to creative future-world expo’s where creative scientists and writers imagine how technology can change the world! I have to admit going to fairs are much more fun than reading this novel for me. So, I am going on a sideways tour in my review, which has become necessarily about showing creative inventions about the future of science-based technology. Just because. Bite me.
My hometown of Seattle had a World’s Fair in 1962. It was fascinating to see the future world exposition that predominated in this fair. I was a little girl, but possibly going to Seattle’s fair is why science fiction is my favorite genre (mysteries are my second favorite, probably because of my childhood - another story).
The Seattle fair was full of possible future inventions and designs for the home, work, and outer space. One of its developments, the Space Needle, is still standing. It has become an iconic landmark. But it has been remodeled, and some of its original use by ordinary middle-class folk was lost, like free admittance. I remember the excitement of eating in the restaurant at the top, 620 feet up, which was on a turntable mechanism.
Almost all of the exhibits, like the Space Needle, have been completely redone into something else. The Bubbleater, a real wonder to me at age 7, is probably in pieces in a garbage dump. Still, if done right, imagining the future can be done in an exciting manner whether one is reading a novel or attending a fair!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_21_Exposition
The Century 21 Exposition (also known as the Seattle World's Fair) was a world's fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair.
As planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works; some credit it with revitalizing Seattle's economic and cultural life (see History of Seattle since 1940). The fair saw the construction of the Space Needle and Alweg monorail, as well as several sports venues (Washington State Coliseum, now Climate Pledge Arena) and performing arts buildings (the Playhouse, now the Cornish Playhouse), most of which have since been replaced or heavily remodeled. Unlike some other world's fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit.
The site, slightly expanded since the fair, is now called Seattle Center; the United States Science Pavilion is now the Pacific Science Center. Another notable Seattle Center building, the Museum of Pop Culture (earlier called EMP Museum), was built nearly 40 years later and designed to fit in with the fairground atmosphere.
With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".
The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s. Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology.[6] In contrast, 12 years later—even in far more conservative Spokane, Washington—Expo '74 took environmentalism as its central theme. The theme of Spokane's Expo '74 was "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment.".
The grounds of the fair were divided into:
World of Science
World of Century 21 (also known as World of Tomorrow)
World of Commerce and Industry
World of Art
World of Entertainment
Show Street
Gayway
Boulevards of the World
Exhibit Fair
Food and Favors
Food Circus
World of Century 21
The Washington State Coliseum, financed by the state of Washington, was one of Thiry's own architectural contributions to the fairgrounds. His original conception had been staging the entire fair under a single giant air-conditioned tent-like structure, "a city of its own", but there were neither the budgets nor the tight agreements on concept to realize that vision. In the end, he got exactly enough of a budget to design and build a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) building suitable to hold a variety of exhibition spaces and equally suitable for later conversion to a sports arena and convention facility.
Pavilion of Electric Power
During the festival, the building hosted several exhibits. Nearly half of its surface area was occupied by the state's own circular exhibit "Century 21—The Threshold and the Threat", also known as the "World of Tomorrow" exhibit, billed as a "21-minute tour of the future". The building also housed exhibits by France, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), General Motors (GM), the American Library Association (ALA), and RCA, as well as a Washington state tourist center.
In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe.
Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night. The next cluster of cubes zoomed in on a vision of a high-tech, future home in a sylvan setting (and a commuter gyrocopter); a series of projections contrasted this "best of the future" to "the worst of the present" (over-uniform suburbs, a dreary urban housing project).
GM's Firebird III
The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway). There was also an "office of the future", a climate-controlled "farm factory", an automated offshore kelp and plankton harvesting farm, a vision of the schools of the future with "electronic storehouses of knowledge", and a vision of the many recreations that technology would free humans to pursue.
Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".
Under the same roof, the ALA exhibited a "library of the future" (centered on a Univac computer). GM exhibited its vision for highways and vehicles of the future (the latter including the Firebird III). Pan Am exhibited a giant globe that emphasized the notion that we had come to be able to think of distances between major world cities in hours and minutes rather than in terms of chancy voyages over great distances. RCA (which produced "The Threshold and the Threat") exhibited television, radio, and stereo technology, as well as its involvement in space. The French government had an exhibit with its own take on technological progress. Finally, a Washington state tourist center provided information for fair-goers wishing to tour the state.
I wish ‘The Terraformers’ had emphasized the sizzle of speculative science more, like the Seattle Fair.
Each of the three sections of the book, representing a progression of a thousand or so years passing and another generation of characters taking over the narration, showcased how a planet called Sask-E changed from an uninhabitable planet with the wrong kind of air for H. Sapiens to a thriving terraformed center of commerce with thousands of different lifeforms. I was reminded of The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (start here - [b:Red Mars|77507|Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660272828l/77507._SY75_.jpg|40712]).
Unfortunately for many readers, the novel is more of a 300-page tour about an imagined future of designed lab-grown lifeforms, sentient robots and amazing ‘green’ technology. The characters are interesting, but they are completely washed away in an ocean of extensive technological world-building. As a book of speculative science and technology, the novel is fantastic. As an engrossing novel of science fiction, the book sucks - unless a reader really wants to read what is primarily an overview of speculative body reshaping and how such technology might affect societies.
The three parts are:
-Settlers (year 59,006, mission - Ecosystem Maintenance)
-Public Works (59,706, mission - Survey for Intercity Transit)
-Gentrifiers (60,610, mission, Serve the Public)
Newitz shows how technology shapes the planet, politics and its people. Apparently, the politics isn’t very different from Earth’s real-life colonial history. And, as is the usual, the advanced technology, owned by those ‘Who Have’ politicians and business corporations, is used to abuse others. Some of the available tech controls some of the various populations mostly through physical limits on their intelligence, and by installing spying devices into their bodies. These sentient beings are ‘slaved’ to corporate bosses or rich owners. Free sentients, with their brains intact, are grown in the planet’s one free city, called Spider City. There are sentient trains, animals and robots. People are grown from manipulated gene stocks, with some populations being similar to Neanderthals. The Neanderthal-like individuals, part of an enormously varied group of people called H. Diversus, were designed to breathe and work on Sask-E while it was being terraformed. They now mostly live under a volcano in Spider City, where the old air of Sask-E is still used. After the initial terraforming was done by the Neanderthal-like beings, H. Sapiens, with their many different altered body forms depending on personal caprice, or their rented non-sentient robot bodies they are ported into, arrive. They now all work and live on Sask-E in most of its cities and farms along with a lot of sentient creatures and robots. Even earthworms have been given sentience.
Gentle reader, sentient earthworms could have been fun! But no. They aren’t given much to do in this novel.
The planet is considered a private entity since everyone and everything, at least those not from free Spider City, belongs to private enterprises. Each city is a separate competitor of the other cities similar to the city-states of the ancient Greeks, except governance is done by competing corporate interests.
By the third part, lower-class citizens in many of the cities, and everyone from Spider City, are seething because of the stranglehold on the planet by the corporations. Eventually, the elites begin evicting the less fortunate from their homes. The controlling corporations want to tear down the older communities of servants and workers and build more elite residential towers. Tent towns, which became necessary as a result, are being attacked and razed. Spider City is also being threatened from losing its status as free. A corporation wants to wipe it out and build a transport service where Spider City used to be.
Can Moose the journalist cat and Scrubjay the train stop the corporations, especially the rapacious robot human Cylindra, owner of the city Emerald?
This novel had a lot of possible joy in it, but I couldn’t find much beyond reading about amazing biological/mechanical critters. They have PG-16 sex! One scene. There is that….
It is a lot of fun to go to creative future-world expo’s where creative scientists and writers imagine how technology can change the world! I have to admit going to fairs are much more fun than reading this novel for me. So, I am going on a sideways tour in my review, which has become necessarily about showing creative inventions about the future of science-based technology. Just because. Bite me.
My hometown of Seattle had a World’s Fair in 1962. It was fascinating to see the future world exposition that predominated in this fair. I was a little girl, but possibly going to Seattle’s fair is why science fiction is my favorite genre (mysteries are my second favorite, probably because of my childhood - another story).
The Seattle fair was full of possible future inventions and designs for the home, work, and outer space. One of its developments, the Space Needle, is still standing. It has become an iconic landmark. But it has been remodeled, and some of its original use by ordinary middle-class folk was lost, like free admittance. I remember the excitement of eating in the restaurant at the top, 620 feet up, which was on a turntable mechanism.
Almost all of the exhibits, like the Space Needle, have been completely redone into something else. The Bubbleater, a real wonder to me at age 7, is probably in pieces in a garbage dump. Still, if done right, imagining the future can be done in an exciting manner whether one is reading a novel or attending a fair!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_21_Exposition
The Century 21 Exposition (also known as the Seattle World's Fair) was a world's fair held April 21, 1962, to October 21, 1962, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair.
As planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works; some credit it with revitalizing Seattle's economic and cultural life (see History of Seattle since 1940). The fair saw the construction of the Space Needle and Alweg monorail, as well as several sports venues (Washington State Coliseum, now Climate Pledge Arena) and performing arts buildings (the Playhouse, now the Cornish Playhouse), most of which have since been replaced or heavily remodeled. Unlike some other world's fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit.
The site, slightly expanded since the fair, is now called Seattle Center; the United States Science Pavilion is now the Pacific Science Center. Another notable Seattle Center building, the Museum of Pop Culture (earlier called EMP Museum), was built nearly 40 years later and designed to fit in with the fairground atmosphere.
With the Space Race underway and Boeing having "put Seattle on the map" as "an aerospace city", a major theme of the fair was to show that "the United States was not really 'behind' the Soviet Union in the realms of science and space". As a result, the themes of space, science, and the future completely trumped the earlier conception of a "Festival of the [American] West".
The fair's vision of the future displayed a technologically based optimism that did not anticipate any dramatic social change, one rooted in the 1950s rather than in the cultural tides that would emerge in the 1960s. Affluence, automation, consumerism, and American power would grow; social equity would simply take care of itself on a rising tide of abundance; the human race would master nature through technology rather than view it in terms of ecology.[6] In contrast, 12 years later—even in far more conservative Spokane, Washington—Expo '74 took environmentalism as its central theme. The theme of Spokane's Expo '74 was "Celebrating Tomorrow's Fresh New Environment.".
The grounds of the fair were divided into:
World of Science
World of Century 21 (also known as World of Tomorrow)
World of Commerce and Industry
World of Art
World of Entertainment
Show Street
Gayway
Boulevards of the World
Exhibit Fair
Food and Favors
Food Circus
World of Century 21
The Washington State Coliseum, financed by the state of Washington, was one of Thiry's own architectural contributions to the fairgrounds. His original conception had been staging the entire fair under a single giant air-conditioned tent-like structure, "a city of its own", but there were neither the budgets nor the tight agreements on concept to realize that vision. In the end, he got exactly enough of a budget to design and build a 160,000-square-foot (15,000 m2) building suitable to hold a variety of exhibition spaces and equally suitable for later conversion to a sports arena and convention facility.
Pavilion of Electric Power
During the festival, the building hosted several exhibits. Nearly half of its surface area was occupied by the state's own circular exhibit "Century 21—The Threshold and the Threat", also known as the "World of Tomorrow" exhibit, billed as a "21-minute tour of the future". The building also housed exhibits by France, Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), General Motors (GM), the American Library Association (ALA), and RCA, as well as a Washington state tourist center.
In "The Threshold and the Threat", visitors rode a "Bubbleator" into the "world of tomorrow". Music "from another world" and a shifting pattern of lights accompanied them on a 40-second upward journey to a starry space bathed in golden light. Then they were faced briefly with an image of a desperate family in a fallout shelter, which vanished and was replaced by a series of images reflecting the sweep of history, starting with the Acropolis and ending with an image of Marilyn Monroe.
Next, visitors were beckoned into a cluster of cubes containing a model of a "city of the future" (which a few landmarks clearly indicated as Seattle) and its suburban and rural surroundings, seen first by day and later by night. The next cluster of cubes zoomed in on a vision of a high-tech, future home in a sylvan setting (and a commuter gyrocopter); a series of projections contrasted this "best of the future" to "the worst of the present" (over-uniform suburbs, a dreary urban housing project).
GM's Firebird III
The exhibit continued with a vision of future transportation (centered on a monorail and high-speed "air cars" on an electrically controlled highway). There was also an "office of the future", a climate-controlled "farm factory", an automated offshore kelp and plankton harvesting farm, a vision of the schools of the future with "electronic storehouses of knowledge", and a vision of the many recreations that technology would free humans to pursue.
Finally, the tour ended with a symbolic sculptural tree and the reappearance of the family in the fallout shelter and the sound of a ticking clock, a brief silence, an extract from President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, followed by a further "symphony of music and color".
Under the same roof, the ALA exhibited a "library of the future" (centered on a Univac computer). GM exhibited its vision for highways and vehicles of the future (the latter including the Firebird III). Pan Am exhibited a giant globe that emphasized the notion that we had come to be able to think of distances between major world cities in hours and minutes rather than in terms of chancy voyages over great distances. RCA (which produced "The Threshold and the Threat") exhibited television, radio, and stereo technology, as well as its involvement in space. The French government had an exhibit with its own take on technological progress. Finally, a Washington state tourist center provided information for fair-goers wishing to tour the state.
I wish ‘The Terraformers’ had emphasized the sizzle of speculative science more, like the Seattle Fair.
emotional
reflective
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:
No
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
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:
No
What a weird one. Moose that fly? It was a bit too... Hooky jooky.
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I loved this book and its hopeful message about revolution, as well as the exquisite worldbuilding. My only gripe is that so much happened and so many characters were introduced, and I wish we had more time to linger and get to know each one.
Wow. That was bad.
There were too many things happening in this book for it to be enjoyable. This really felt like a waste of my time which is a shame; I was looking forward to this book for a bit.
There were too many things happening in this book for it to be enjoyable. This really felt like a waste of my time which is a shame; I was looking forward to this book for a bit.
A wonderfully hopeful and inventive saga of how a planet might be terraformed, with all the creatures and inanimate objects in it treated with respect, despite the negative corporate and commercial influences brought to bear on the whole enterprises. I read it as a galley because Martha Wells liked it and I was glad I did.