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The Terraformers Hardcover – January 31, 2023
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From science fiction visionary Annalee Newitz comes The Terraformers, a sweeping, uplifting, and illuminating exploration of the future.
Destry's life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her.
But the bright, clean future they're building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn’t exist, hidden inside a massive volcano.
As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she's devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E's future for generations to come.
A science fiction epic for our times and a love letter to our future, The Terraformers will take you on a journey spanning thousands of years and exploring the triumphs, strife, and hope that find us wherever we make our home.
"Brilliantly thoughtful, prescient, and gripping.”―Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries
Also by Annalee Newitz
Autonomous
The Future of Another Timeline
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication dateJanuary 31, 2023
- Dimensions6.55 x 1.15 x 9.55 inches
- ISBN-101250228018
- ISBN-13978-1250228017
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"The Terraformers is so engaging, you could almost miss the pyrotechnic world-building and bone-deep intelligence. Newitz continues doing some of the best work in the field."―James S. A. Corey, author of the Expanse series
"Fascinating and readable in equal measure, The Terraformers will remake your mind like its cast remakes an entire planet."―John Scalzi, author of The Collapsing Empire
"The reader of Annalee Newitz’s third novel, The Terraformers, will surely walk away stunned and bedazzled . . . this generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. But the reading experience is never clotted or tedious, never plagued by extraneous detours . . . [Newitz has] gifted us a vibrant, quirky vision of endless potential earned by heroism, love and wit."―The Washington Post
"With an intriguing mixture of AI, intelligent animals, cyborgs, and humans, Newitz depicts a complex but hopeful future where environmental consciousness and people’s rights take precedence.”―Buzzfeed
"Newitz performs a staggering feat of revolutionary imagination in this hopeful space-opera. . . . With the ethos of Becky Chambers and the gonzo imagination of Samuel R. Delany, plus a strong scientific basis in ecology and urban planning, this feels like a new frontier in science fiction."―Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity.”―N. K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy and The City We Became
"Brilliantly thoughtful, prescient, and gripping.”―Martha Wells, author of The Murderbot Diaries
"[A] magnificently fun sci-fi space opera. The Terraformers explores the future effects of climate change, personhood, scientific advances and more with imagination, intelligence and optimism."―Ms. Magazine
"[Featuring] an appealingly diverse cast of rangers, scientists, engineers and an utterly endearing autonomous collective of sentient flying trains... The Terraformers, refreshingly, is the opposite of the dystopian, we’re-all-doomed chiller that’s become so common in climate fiction. Newitz’s mordant sense of humor steers the story clear of starry-eyed optimism, but it’s easy to imagine future generations studying this novel as a primer for how to embrace solutions to the challenges we all face."―Scientific American
"An incredibly emotional and action-packed novel deftly taking on personhood, corporate ownership, and terraforming.”―Library Journal, STARRED review
“A complete refurbishment of the great galactic story of terraformers. The old pleasures of the planetary romance are reanimated in kaleidoscopic fashion. Startling fun!”―Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
"Newitz’s latest is far-reaching and ambitious but also surprisingly cozy and warm. . . . Newitz has a true gift for exploring the tweaks, movements, and decisions that keep history moving forward centuries ahead, and for digging into weighty issues while maintaining light humor, a delightful queer sensibility, and pure moments of joy."―Booklist, STARRED review
"An epic geo-engineering thought experiment on the scale of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and a refreshingly hopeful vision of humanity’s fate among the stars.”―Polygon
“The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz is undoubtedly destined to become a classic of the hopepunk movement . . . It takes genuine faith in the future to write science fiction like this, to ask the big questions and offer so many wild and wondrous answers. If you’ve been looking for an antidote to the apocalypse, this novel is for you."―San Francisco Chronicle
“Annalee Newitz’s ability to combine the wild west and the final frontier with plate tectonics and post humanism while spinning an epic tale that never loses sight of its characters is nothing short of magical. After reading The Terraformers you will want to live in Annalee Newitz’s future.”―Javier Grillo-Marxuach, creator of The Middleman and producer on Lost and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
“Through a series of linked stories, Newitz crafts a unique cli-fi that centers land sovereignty and the dangers of capitalism, brought to life by their signature talent for weaving plausible science in with the tackling of big moral questions.”―Tor.com
"Warm, imaginative and often funny, Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers thoughtfully examines corporate colonialism and humanity’s ever-present need to expand . . . and Newitz giddily explores the convergence of digital and ecological systems with infectious enthusiasm. The Terraformers is full of parallels to contemporary issues, and while Newitz intensely examines these topics, the reader will never feel lectured at, bored or disconnected from the characters."―BookPage
"While the novel entices with its brilliant and varied cast of human and nonhuman characters (I was particularly taken by Rocket the drone, Scrubjoy the train, and those moose), it also offers a serious and hopeful template that’s a lot closer to home than all those distant light-years and centuries might at first suggest."―Locus Magazine
“An ingenious, galaxy-brain book . . . plate tectonics, river flow and transit all play central roles in the book’s plot, and each is handled with intelligence and often a delightful weirdness.”―Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Tor Books (January 31, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250228018
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250228017
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.55 x 1.15 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #299,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #327 in Colonization Science Fiction
- #1,085 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,837 in Exploration Science Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Annalee Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture.
Their first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. They are currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Previously, they were the founding editor of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and as the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. They have also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. They have published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows.
Annalee is the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
They were the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.
Learn more at AnnaleeNewitz.com or follow them on Twitter @annaleen
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Top reviews from the United States
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This is a complex slow-building story fifty-seven thousand years into the future and then encompassing another 1500 years. Thanks to genetic engineering, technology and evolution humans with money and power can pretty much exist forever. Other "people" now include some animals and robots, too, but lines are blurred as organic and inorganic mesh together.
This is a story built on plot and worldbuilding over character driven narrative, and so it can be very slow. But overall it pays off, exploring what it means to be human and that even in a utopian premise things turn ugly when it comes to money, power, and privilege. 3.5 stars.
We do get to see a vision of a future where engineered humans, sentient animals, and intelligent robots collaborate and work together to create a better world.
However, Newitz is too in love with their characters and concepts to put them through the ringer. Instead we see well-adjusted individuals collaborating almost frictionlessly, smoothly succeeding against the supposed odds every time without any missteps.
Against these paragons, we see corporate antagonists who despite having the kind of control over their workforce that a robber baron could only dream of (including near-complete control over their technologies, communications, imports, education, bodily structure and brain structure along with the legal right to literally terminate them at will) somehow focus on the most over-the-top (orbital death lasers) and petty (nagging individual micromanagement) tools available to them, resulting in their failure at every turn.
There are great characters and concepts here, but Newitz has simply placed them on a path to seemingly inevitable success instead of making them struggle and giving them the chance to truly triumph. I expected more from the author of Autonomous, and I feel like the ERT and its assorted sentients deserved a better showing.
I don’t think the book is perfect, but it didn’t disappoint at all. It hits so many quality points establishing two related societies and their places in the wider world. It feels lived in from the beginning. It has depth of science of relationships of economy and millennia of story that seems vividly real. The characters have rich backgrounds and complicated motivations and responses to challenges. It has actual flying sentient møøse and a sentient cat named Moose who’s a (pardon the pun) dogged investigative reporter. It has housing economics and some violent gentrification.
It has sentient naked mole rats making sentient earthworms.
I love the story plot. I’m wondering how some of the background setting gets that way… but I’ll buy it and move on to what the story is addressing directly. You could have dropped half the side plots and still had the story, but they make it feel real and vivid. I am buying it again for a friend who’s an aspiring writer. You should buy it too.
Top reviews from other countries
The book is bursting with interesting science fiction ideas. It’s therefore a pity that Newitz’s distant and rather flat narrative style fails to generate interest. Description is not their strong point, and far too often we must be told that a spectacular scene is beautiful or stunning rather than being shown this through engaging imagery. There are no surprising plot developments and, despite the opinion of many high profile reviews, exploration of character is scanty; the baddies are just nasty self-obsessed capitalists and the goodies are uniformly friendly and committed to green politics. Despite a large cast, only two characters are sufficiently complex to elicit any sympathy in the reader: an intelligent moose whose neuro-verbal apparatus has been deliberately damaged during his genesis so that he can be classified as intellectually inferior, and a human individual so over-endowed, again deliberately, with sensory apparatus that touching anything is a torture, masking his underlying empathic nature.
While Newitz’s style could perhaps work in shorter fiction (their previous novel Autonomous, at 300 pages, just about manages to maintain reader interest), in a novel of more than 500 pages it’s frankly tedious. Ultimately it reads like an interminable pony book with added sex. I’m afraid I can’t recommend it.









