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A review by podanotherjessi
The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
Did not finish book. Stopped at 37%.
I was just, at no point in this book, engaged in the story. 90% of why I was reading was because I thought Whisper was really cool. And that's really it.
The world building was confusing to me. It felt like it was trying to be whimsical and fun, the kind of thing you don't ask questions about. But the book was just too hard sci-fi to get away with that. So I had dozens of questions that the book seemed to have no interest in answering. It was distracting.
I didn't care about the characters. The plot was uninteresting. The themes were incredibly blunt and left no room for the reader to form their own opinions. And then something happened at the end of part one that infuriated me so much I just couldn't make myself continue.
But honestly, the worst part is that this book isn't at all what the synopsis makes it out to be. Maybe it's my fault for interpreting it the way I did, setting myself up for disappointment, but I do think the synopsis is inaccurate.
What I thought I was getting: A character that terraforms planets for the greater good, thinking she's doing right by humanity. And then she reaches a planet that's already inhabited, and she (and the reader) have to grapple with what the right course of action is. Should she continue the terraforming project, knowing the life already there will suffer as a result, but that it will create a new home for humanity? Or should she allow humanity to suffer to save these other beings?
What the book actually is (spoilered, because apparently readers shouldn't know this going in):A woman working for an obviously evil corporation terraforms planets for no apparent reason. While she's doing this, she finds a group of people that were previously terraforming this planet for the same corporation but were supposed to have dies off when Destry and her coworkers came. Because the corporation is obviously evil, Destry immediately sides with this other group and starts planning how to help them maintain their place on this planet.
There's just no internal conflict, and it's boring.
The world building was confusing to me. It felt like it was trying to be whimsical and fun, the kind of thing you don't ask questions about. But the book was just too hard sci-fi to get away with that. So I had dozens of questions that the book seemed to have no interest in answering. It was distracting.
I didn't care about the characters. The plot was uninteresting. The themes were incredibly blunt and left no room for the reader to form their own opinions. And then something happened at the end of part one that infuriated me so much I just couldn't make myself continue.
But honestly, the worst part is that this book isn't at all what the synopsis makes it out to be. Maybe it's my fault for interpreting it the way I did, setting myself up for disappointment, but I do think the synopsis is inaccurate.
What I thought I was getting: A character that terraforms planets for the greater good, thinking she's doing right by humanity. And then she reaches a planet that's already inhabited, and she (and the reader) have to grapple with what the right course of action is. Should she continue the terraforming project, knowing the life already there will suffer as a result, but that it will create a new home for humanity? Or should she allow humanity to suffer to save these other beings?
What the book actually is (spoilered, because apparently readers shouldn't know this going in):
There's just no internal conflict, and it's boring.