Sulfur tried to imagine talking to a worm, and found the idea soothing.

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

You want some Sci-Fi, but with an environmentally conscious plot? You always thought that animals should be persons and you want to experience everything they can give, be it friendship, comradery or even love? You want a story that spans over hundreds and thousands of years, yet manages to portray characters that you will fall in love with? Then let me invite you to „The Terraformers“. I can honestly say, I have never read something comparable to this. I mean, its easily categorized as an lgbtq+-friendly, environment-conscious Science-Fiction. That in itself is a lot, but that doesn’t really prepare one for what that translates to in this gorgeous tale.

In „Terraformers“ we follow the story of the inhabitants of Sask-E, a planet somewhere in the universe, built to resemble Earth and marketed as such to be sold to the highest bidders. To get as earthlike as possible with the flora and fauna, a complex and working ecosystem is required. The company behind cultivating Sask-E is Verdance, a huge company that is specialized in those kind of endeavours. To monitor the extremely fickle ecosystem Verdance built a population of workers on the planet, called Rangers. They are built humanlike, but have some technical abilities build in themselves that empowers them to connect to their environmental surroundings. Those are the people we follow mainly here. Not exclusively though, as not only are humans able to connect to their environment, but in a similar process certain animals also have the ability to think more humanlike and for that communicate with them via language. This alone makes for a story that is interesting as heck. But Newitz also threw in some hominin variations, a lot of hanky-panky between all of them and of course all is embedded in a classical Science-Fiction plot about standing up against a universe-ruling company that seems to be overpowering everything. If I would want to give more of an overview, I would have to explain the whole plot basically, so I will keep it at that.

The writing style was nice, not overly ornate, not bland either and took us well through the story. I loved the depictions of the natural environment and how the people there managed to live in unison and peace with it (very inspiring regarding our current situation of course). The introduction of cognitive enhanced and talking animals and other human life forms was interesting and forfilled exactly what I love about science fiction. And yet its uniqueness is what made it most special to me. As said, I can’t compare it to any other book I know so far, and I think thats amazing! The humor was on point and I found myself chuckling in regards to the banter between the characters or the absolutely funny mentionings of old earth behaviour (i.e. regarding the obsession with analysing your genes to „know“ where your ancestors came from).

„The Terraformers“ was just realeased in february of this year (2023). The book is a standalone and not part of a series, which I think is fine in concept. I really think that there need to be more standalones in general. Not everything needs to be a series, especially as I often think that some of the books in series aren’t able to hold up the excitement that the first book sparked. That being said, I could see the Terraformers as a series though, simply because it spans over a whole lot of years and kind of looses some traction through that (I will make more clear in a paragraph below what I mean by that).

The thing that surprised me the most were the sex scenes, because yes, there are some. I noticed though that this gets more and more common in fantasy and science fiction novels, and I have nothing against it I have to say, especially because they were not dragged out in any way and stopped when we got the jist of what was happening. Not gonna lie though, smut is not something I come for to fantasy and Sci-fi books, but it took nothing from the story, so its fine by me.
And Newitz really made the consent clear in every one of those scenes, which grants her my everlasting approval!

A strange thing to maybe consider in a book, but I always do: The mentioning of food. One of my biggest hobbies is cooking (next to reading of course) and I love to read mouthwatering depicitons of food in books, and oftentimes I try to cook or bake them (thinking about blogging this too, what do you think?). And in here were so many tasty dishes depicted, that I found my mouth watering every other page. I mean who wouldn’t, when you are reading things like this:
„Thankfully, there was still a heaping tray of pierogies and pickled mustard greens on the grab table. (…) The dumplings were still warm, and she’d scored a few stuffed with spicy lentils as well as potato and curried carrot.“

The only aspects I have to critique a bit are the following ones: I didn’t care too much for the pacing. Of course that is really hard to do, when you are telling a story that is spanning over thousands of years. Newitz work is divided in three parts for that, but the pacing in themselves is odd in my opinion. Certain scenes, situations, plot parts are very slow and then suddenly there is a cut (at interesting points in the story as well) and then its a few weeks or months later. That didn’t feel coherent in my opinion. And the other thing is that the characters are lovely and likeable, but due to the odd pacing and the short amount we get to know them, I couldn’t really connect to them in the end. The character development is there, but not really comprehensible because of that. AS well the world building could have gone farther. That is probably also due to the overall length of the book, given that its only 338 pages long and then also divided into the three parts themselves, which leaves us with roughly only 100 pages for each story line. I would have preferred a longer book here, just because it would have made sense to really get that immersion in this vast and beautiful world and the deep connection to the interesting characters.

Another minor complaint reagrding the layout (and therefore not at all Newitz’s fault of course!): The writing was on the smaller side and that was a bit strenuous on the eyes. I see that as the first signs of old age in myself though and take my complaint not too serious as that 😉

Overall I so so enjoyed myself reading this book. As stated in other blogposts of mine already, I like the books best that really keep me thinking and surprise me … and here comes Annalee Newitz and delivers me exactly that! I am very interested if there will be any comparable novels in the future, of if there are any that I am maybe not aware of (Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy maybe?).

So I end this with a question to you all: Do you know similar books?

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 stars

This is for you if…

… you want something very new and unique in the Sci-Fi genre

… you usually miss the environmental component in Sci-Fi novels

… you want to broaden your horizon regarding relationships between animals and humans

… you want simply a good Sci-Fi book, that is also a standalone

Trigger Warnings: Physical violence and war; sexual intimacy