...researchers found the H. sapiens germline in a seventy-thousand-year-old biobank that had been moldering in the museum basement. Nobody is really sure what the biobank was for, but archaeologists think it probably had some kind of ritual use. Back then, people had all kinds of superstitions about their genomes. They would send their genetic material to this biobank, and analysts would tell their fortunes by grouping them into categories like ‘West African’ or ‘European’ or ‘Indigenous American.’ [loc. 5568]
Told in three parts, The Terraformers is set in the far future, on a planet known as Sask-E. The terraformers are employees (or perhaps slaves) of Verdance, an interstellar corporation whose goal is to recreate Pleistocene-era Earth -- before the Great Bargain which endowed some non-human animals with human-level intelligence (subject to certain controls) and averted ecological catastrophe. It was at this mythical time that the Environmental Rescue Team (ERT) was formed, its remit to manage ecosystems.
The first third of the novel, 'Settlers', is the story of ERT Ranger Destry and her companion Whistle. (Who is a moose. Who can fly.) Destry and Whistle discover a subterranean city inhabited by the original terraformers, all Homo Diversus -- a generic term for customised hominin builds who were designed to perform the earliest stages of the terraforming process. They prefer to call themselves Archaeans, and they're unimpressed with Verdance.
The second part of the novel, 'Public Works', is set some centuries later and deals with a team trying to design a public transit system, despite Verdance's best efforts to keep the unwashed masses at bay. 'There would be excuses about how trains messed up the Pleistocene purity of Sasky, but really it would be about not wanting to deal with the class of person who took public transit.' (The moral of this section of the novel is 'always read the appendices to the planning reports'.) And the final third, 'Gentrification', deals with corporate greed and 'cleansing' of undesirables -- mostly non-human people, an ever-broadening category that includes the section's protagonists, a cat named Moose who works as an investigative journalist and a flying train named Scrubjack. Verdance has always intended Sask-E to be a place where H. Sapiens can reign supreme, just as it was before the Great Bargain...
There is a lot in this novel. Many of the little details of worldbuilding (such as swearing and profanity being scatalogical rather than sexual; such as robot kink bars) have stuck with me. But The Terraformers is not only a novel about the far future, it is a novel about now: what makes a person a person? Does a small vocabulary -- Whistle can only speak in one-syllable words, as per design -- mean a person is unintelligent? Can people be owned? How do revolutions happen? Is authenticity another name for prejudice? Are all corporations evil?
For me this was an engaging and richly detailed novel -- or rather, three linked novellas -- though I did not engage with (or like) all the protagonists, and some of the plot turns seemed to depend on people making improbably poor and/or draconian decisions. Newitz, who's also a professional science journalist, presents scientific ideas clearly, and the relationships at the core of each part of the novel are just as vivid as the futuristic sciences.
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of many geoengineering epics, told me (jokingly) that he would permit me to write about terraforming as long as I included a character named Kim, and so I have. [loc 5939]
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