![]() There’s delight in this: the thoughtful body language of cats figures prominently at points, and a wide cast of animal personalities appears throughout.īut the book is also pointed in its examination of how we, the readers, may relate to animals. Cybernetically enhanced, animals in The Terraformers text their companions, sharing their points of view and preferences, allowing them to be narrative prime-movers in their own right. ![]() Unlike Herriot, Newitz is unbound by depression-era Britain’s technological limitations. Not since James Herriot have I seen so many animals depicted with love, compassion and centrality to the story. Newitz also asks through this work whether we are complicit ourselves in the everyday oppression of innocent lives yearning to be free. Good speculative fiction challenges as much as it validates. There’s also great stuff in here about the raw, utilitarian mechanics of colonialism broadly: far-off people craving yet more wealth, making social and infrastructure decisions for people they’ll never meet, who have no recourse. My favorite bits involve the places where the powerful are just pathologically incurious, and how this creates long term consequences for their influence. Anyone who has slotted into a corporate system whose executive team was far out of view will find themselves witnessed by this book. Newitz brings an empathetic clarity to the experience of being employed. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I had a full-body limbic response to some of the email subject lines that issue from Ronnie, a central corporate figure in the story. Newitz brings these dry facts to vivid life, depicting the frustration and casual humiliation of living each day under the control of someone who sees you as a tool to implement their edicts. They reflect a disparity of power, and they describe an everyday existence where wealth and corporate bureaucracies strip workers of agency and ignore their insights. They reflect human experiences and traumas. The statistics are more than just numbers in a spreadsheet. To say nothing about desperation in the developing world. The middle class erodes steadily, the wealthy control more and more wealth, and the poor grow both in number and in their precarity. Meanwhile, wealth inequality ratchets tighter and tighter each year, especially since the pandemic. If you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay poor. The geometry of social mobility is bound up in the shape of inequality, and today we have both at extremes. This is a book that wants to talk about social stratification. ![]() While that’s not central to my enjoyment of a book, I like when the details enhance the magic instead of break it.īut what makes The Terraformers stand out, why you have to read it, is much more human than technical. I completely believe in the elaborate, far-future computing systems described here. Similarly, while Terraformers isn’t cyberpunk per se-not fetishizing endlessly upon the details of brain-computer interfaces-it is such a technically competent work. In a previous Newitz work, Autonomous, the author impressed me with the casual inclusion of computing mechanics that moved the plot forward in ways that were coherent, plausible and folded neatly into the story. Unlike Foundation, I was able to finish this one: its representation of gender and sexuality was refreshingly complete. The range of characters and timespans brings to mind Foundation, Asimov’s epic of collapsing empire. They explore the long-term project of terraforming a planet, and the teams who spend lifetimes making it comfortable, habitable and marketable for future residents. In The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz, using they/them pronouns, spins a tale tens of thousands of years into the deep future. A good yarn in this genre gives you better metaphors for understanding your values, and even making the case for them. Speculative fiction is an activist project that both aligns the reader and empowers them with new conceptual tools. In combination, these gifts offer the reader extra fuel to continue in a challenging world. Push the reader, and in the pushing, let fresh perspective permeate more than just the most convenient, already-exposed surfaces. Use all this fresh perspective to let us look with renewed clarity on all that’s wrong, all that’s beautiful, and all we need to do to enact change. Clear the mud from our collective windshields. Help us see the systems that animate social reality, and help us use that vision for our own purposes. Help us understand our world in this moment. Inject tangible energy into our imagination systems. Show us a place we’ve never been, or a perspective on the mundane that we’ve never seen. A speculative fiction author has four jobs:
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