Customer Reviews

Terraforming Earth

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read this book in one sitting. Sadly, not because it was so good, but because I read page after page hoping the book would live up to the promise of the topic and of the author's name.

It didn't. Had the book come from any "lesser" author, I would have settled for 3 stars. But coming from Williamson it was such a let-down I can only give it 1 star.

The characters were unlikeable, indecisive caricatures.

- The perky Hispanic pilot/engineer stereotype who drops some Spanish exclamation more often than Scotty saying "the engines cannae tek it, cap'n". Asexual it seems, or such a sideshow token that the author doesn't care whether he has a love life or not.

- The domineering bully Teuton/Norse who really is a coward - and yet always attracts the girls and becomes the alpha-male. Being German myself this pathetic cartoon really grated.

- The intelligent can-do Asian scientist woman who just can't help herself falling for the Germanic guy above. Or declaring her love for the narrator, but still jumping into bed with alpha-hombre (no not the Hispanic guy)

- The dreamy librarian girl, unattractive and caring only for her books. But she often as not ends up in a menage a troi with the previous two.

- The Asian-African-American who forces himself on to the crew to escape the original Armageddon with his girlfriend. Probably the most likeable of the unlikeable bunch, though his obsession with his girlfriend takes on "Jungian archetype" elements in the way he nearly deifies her. (and the books ending doesn't help that one bit).

- His girlfriend, the goddess-whore stereotype. Saint Mary Magdalene. Nuff said.

- And finally, our narrator, who never seems to DO anything. Not because he a coward, like Herr Wotan above, but because I just felt like kicking him in the behind half the time and get him to do *anything* but fret. When everybody else goes nanotech Nirvana he stays behind, writes his memoirs and ... frets.

There was no feeling of the vast expanses of time that had passed (something Theodore Sturgeon excelled in). As far as I'm concerned the way the passing of time was described, it covered a few months, with it's extremely brief snapshots of events that the characters partake in. Yes, then you get some brief "eons pass"-kind of filler sentence, but blink while reading and you miss it. Very easy to blink, while trying to stay awake...

On top of it all, no explanation on how the heck the moon base stays operative for millions upon millions of years. Just some handwaving "fusion power with water from the moon caps", "nanotechnology keeping it all repaired" and "robots as nurses and teachers".

One thing the book suceeded in, was to evoke that "what would I do" feeling. For me it was: wipe out the bloody gene bank as Earth and the universe would be better off not being replenished every few million years by this bunch of losers.

Two things prompted me to check out this book: (1) The cool cover -- I'm a sucker for good sci-fi artwork. (2) The jacket notes -- I'm also a sucker for post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Anyway, I must admit that the only thing by Williamson I've read before this book was "The Moon Children" back in the early 70s, so I really can't make too many comparisons. But like "The Moon Children," "Terraforming Earth" seems somewhat geared to a younger audience. It's easy reading, and most readers could probably finish it in a day or three. I found the story to be a bit tenuous at times, there were some events and circumstances that the author left insufficiently explained, and the ending (involving the transcendence of our physical forms as human beings) has been done better elsewhere. But the book kept my attention, and I'm glad I read it, so THREE STARS. If you know any older teens who enjoy visionary sci-fi, "Terraforming Earth" would make a nice gift.

Forget the title and the intriguing cover art, both are misleading. This book is about the earth getting whacked and a bunch of cloned kids passively waiting for it to re-evolve on it's own through many generations--no assembly required. So if you're hoping for great feats of engineering look elsewhere.

There is absolutely zero tension in this novel. The writing at times is so detached it becomes unintentionally sociopathic--as when the children visit their super-evolved and much-beloved uncle, but when they arrive unexpectedly he abandons them and suggests they should find their way to a museum exhibit where they will fit in with the interactive robots. I'm not kidding. It's about equivalent to telling an orphan to go live at Chuck E. Cheese with the animatronic band who seem very friendly. But in a few more pages, he's their beloved uncle again and a hero figure for the book. It's disturbing, but not in a good literary kind of way, more like a "Is Mr.Williamson taking his meds?" kind of way.

And there's precious little science in this fiction. The clone kids are along for the ride while the "computer" makes all the decisions and never explains it's analysis to them or the reader. The criminally incurious kids may not want to ask the big questions, but that's a pretty big reason why people read SF novels. I don't how an author gets to be a Grand Master without figuring that one out. I'll just assume Williamson's former novels were better, though I do plan to avoid them along with the books touching them on either side just to be safe.

Please, people rating this book highly, read some Dan Simmons or Greg Bear. Dust off the old Asimov and Heinlein sitting in libraries for free. There's so much better to be had. This is a one-star book if these ratings are to hold meaning.

This book is really four novelettes retrofitted around "The Ultimate Earth," a novelette which (inexplicably) won all sorts of awards. Like a lot of "novels" that are jury-rigged around extended short stories, this one has all the weaknesses and few of the strengths that other such novels have. (The best novel of this kind is Fred Pohl's Years of the City, a clear masterpiece.) I found the only good section of this book to be the first. It sets up a remarkable premise and sets about unfolding it rather well. But by the time the book ends, you really don't know who is who and the far future earth seems more like modern-day Africa. Not a single imaginative trope in sight.

This would be an excellent first book, however. Unfortunately, it isn't. The five star ratings this book has received clearly are given to the man and not the work. This isn't a good place to start with one's reading of Jack Williamson.

The first problem with this work is it never really lives up to the title. There is no hard science behind the Earth's future evolution as chronicled here. The characters cloned on the moon charged to repopulate and re-form the Earth's ecology do by happenstance- or perhaps a complete lack of care on the part of the author's. They all just bend with the wind, their actions never directly affecting change. They are simply observers- which also could be the fault of Williamson's choice to use the first person narrative for the book, told by the clones' official biographer and journalist.

I kept reading just to see what the next generations of clones would encounter, and was somewhat disappointed with each section. All of the chapters are almost separate short stories, with the original short, which this work builds upon (which I have not previously read) somewhat sticking out like a sore thumb.

Williamson also shows signs of not quite maturing beyond his 50s sci-fi novels, with winged creatures and mind-controlling parasites populating a few of the chapters. Sorry Jack, but contemporary readers need more than a chronicle with such a heady topic.

This was a wonderful and fast read. But there were a few minor problems that I had with it.

Granted that the main characters are clones who are repeatedly "brought back" to life, but you'd think that after a few generations there'd be ample room for some major identity crisises. Instead, we're treated to the same narrator, Duncan Yare, through several of his cloned incarnations. Each incarnation is somehow the same, yet somehow, creepily, different. However, apparently not different enough.

Going back to the identity crisis bit, you'd think that there would be at least some major differences in personality from clone generation to clone generation, maybe as so far as to have one generation disagree sharply with the choices a previous one made. But no, Arne remains the paranoid, pompus "alpha male," and Casey remains eternally, permanently fixiated on his Mona.

The clone generations seem very resigned and accepting, fatalistic even, about the nature of their eventual replacements/successors. For example, if Arne entertained such paranoid fantasies that he'd go so far as to enslave his companions in the Tycho base, why didn't any of those companions rebel and attempt to destroy any future attempts at creating another generation of Arnes? (Arne is stated as to having assumed this "alpha male" status in at least two different generations.)

The author, Jack Williamson, cleverly never actually states how much time has passed between awakenings of the numerous clone generations. The most specific he ever gets is that it might be a thousand years later, or a million. In a way, he seems to imply that the passage of time is and, simultaneously, is not important to the narrative of his book (as contradictory as that statement seems, it's true).

In short, this book is great for those who just want to waste an afternoon, and those who want to think, "Hey, what if an asteroid really DID hit us?"

Williamson's characters seem incapable of judgment, generation after generation. I found their lack of common sense utterly frustrating. Led by the author's drive to embroil them in poetic and melancholy disaster, they are never allowed to exercise a maturity beyond the level of impetuous children.

Despite his agile prose, imaginative flair, and high concept, his book fails utterly at the one crucial place where a story should connect with its reader - at the human level: Do we relate to these people, are they like us? In their place, what would we do? What does each say about us all?

Over the thousands of years and multiple iterations of the same characters, stupidity seems to be a mathematical constant: every spaceflight turns to disaster for want of fuel, every safari ends in what appears a wasteful and pathetic death, every first contact in enslavement, and always due to a lack of preparation an planning easily evident to a reasonable person.

Essentially, his puppet characters simplify his narrative task by remaining incapable of using their reason, holding their tongues, and exercising a free will that would exercise caution when faced with risk. This allows Mr. Williamson to follow his muse: Their foolishness propels the narrative and opens vistas, but rings false.

Has wisdom, thought and will been bred out of these carousel horses, or does Mr. Williamson simply not care about them?

When Jack Williamson wrote TERRAFORMING EARTH, he was NINETY-THREE years old, and in his SEVENTY-THIRD year as a published author. (He was born in 1908, published his first story in 1928, and wrote this in 2001.)

Take that, Norm McLean!

I think that's pretty amazing, especially since this book, for all its flaws, really is original. An asteroid wipes out almost all life on earth, but human clones and robots live on on a base on the moon. Their goal is to monitor the earth, and restore life to it as soon as possible. Thousands of years pass, then millions, whole ice ages; the master computer and its robots brings the clones back to life, educates them about the earth, its past, and their mission; the clones attempt to restore life, die, and get cloned again millions or however many years later.

The story's idea is terrific, and the first fourth of the book is absolutely great--but it does get redundant, and most times Williamson takes the story into places much less cool than the possibilities suggest. For instance, he brings aliens into the picture, which is just totally unnecessary and doesn't do much for the story. (The aliens arrive in a giant spaceship many miles across, just like in his book THE COMETEERS, and they lead to all sorts of New-Agey imagery of flying golden fruit-women and that sort of thing.) It often does seem a lot like A CANTICLE FOR LIEBOWITZ, with its accounts of civilization passing over thousands of years, and it just seems that it could have been a lot cooler, could have done more justice to its premise.

Still, I enjoyed it, and I appreciate that it really does try to do something different. Plus, I love stories that deal with deep time, that show the process of time passing and evolution, even if, like this one, they don't follow the story all the way to a more natural conclusion, and even if they don't turn our to be all that they could have been.

(I do have to say though, that in my research into works of science fiction set partially in New Mexico, this is one of the most enjoyable books I've come across. The earth's sole survivors take off from a base in the White Sands area.)

Terraforming Earth is a first person perspective story about what happens in the long run after a major collision with Earth. The original plot is very interesting and it keeps you turning the pages to see what will happen. The main characters each have their own personalities and every time they are reborn they follow their same path with a few different variations each time. The new characters who are added into the story later in the book help keep the story from getting boring.
Jack Williamson still has creative ideas even as he is getting older. He changes the direction of the story it seems in the middle and a few times later so that it doesn't get too repetitive. You start to really like a few of the characters and hate a few of the others. I rarely like any books that are first person perspective but this book protrayed the story as if the narrator was indifferent to what was happening. He just told it like it was instead of bogging the story down with his thoughts and emotions. It did not get a five star because some of the story seemed very pointless and the ending was kind of weird. But the story keeps you anxious to see what will happen from their actions when they are born again.
Bottom line- Good plot but a little repetitive although the repetition is what makes it interesting. Four stars.

Jack Williamson was one of my favorite writers when I was growing up and their is enough to this novel to remind me of why I have enjoyed his books so much over the years. At the same time it also illustrated what is missing in some of the science fiction that is written today.

This book takes place initially in the near future after the earth has been decimated by the impact of an enormous asteroid. Fortunately millionare Calvin DeFort had narrowly completed an outpost on the moon and has robots in place to ensure that the clones of a select few survivors will carry on the human species.

What makes these connected series of novellas work is that Jack Williamson never loses sight of what makes us human-both the good and the bad-and the triumphs and the tragedies that go with being human. Combined with a sense of wonder about the universe and evolution this is an very entertaining and captivating tale from a true master of Science Fiction