Title:	The Terraformers
Author:	Annalee Newitz
Category:	Fantasy / Science Fiction
Rating:
Date Reviewed:	April 30, 2026

he only thing I liked about this book was its title, The Terraformers. Unfortunately, the characters and plot involve very little actual terraforming. Instead, the characters debate political and social issues. This is science fiction written by someone who apparently doesn't know much science. Too many times I read a paragraph and immediately thought: "that doesn't make any sense!" If only Newitz had asked someone with a scientific background to read this book before they published it.

The planet Sask-E is being terraformed. Destry is a ranger out in a forest when she encounters a human that shouldn't be there. This man killed some small animals and bullt a cabin. Destry is quite upset - killing those small animals might upset the carbon balance of the entire planet! The man says he is here enjoying the Pleistocene era that the terraformers have recreated on Sask-E. Destry angrily tells him that actually it is the Devonian era, which is why synapsids (sail-backed creatures like dimetrodons) roam the landscape. Where did the terraformers get synapsid DNA? Why would they release synapsids and crocosaurs into the environment? The intruder is actually a remotely controlled construct, a Charter, so Destry shoots it dead (why isn't she worried about adding a human sized mass to the fragile carbon cycle?) 50,000 years into the future, and humans still carry guns instead of less lethal forms of protection? Why doesn't Destry load the dead body onto the lander and send it back to where every it came from?

Destry then mounts her flying moose, Whistle and flies back to home base, the city of LaRange. Whistle the moose has an anti-gravity belt, but what propels him through the air? Anti-gravity will lift an object up off of the surface, but it won't make you fly forward. Why does Destry need a moose to carry her around - couldn't Destry just fly with her own anti-gravity belt?

Destry's boss is the evil Verdance, who is always demanding that non-environmentally perfect projects be completed in a hurry. Verdance is on Venus, which is light years away, and yet there is no time lag in the communications between Verdance and Destry.

Destry is an orphan, her parents were murdered by evil Verdance. But why does Destry have parents when everyone on the planet is decanted from the birthing chambers? Everyone on the planet is also essentially immortal, so Sask-E would be overrun with humans if people reproduced in the normal way instead of being grown in vats. One of the characters uses "they" pronouns, and I wondered why - the humans have the technology to give someone any body modification they choose. A person could be male or female according to their own wishes, there is no need to be transgender. I wondered why humans were decanted with any genitals at all, since sex organs are not needed for reproduction, and hormones in the human body often results in irrational, impulsive behavior. The terraformers would be more productive if they were all sexless and sterile.

Sask-E has no plate tectonics. Yet Sask-E has mountains. How is this possible? Mountains are created by continental plates crashing into each other!

A colony of Archaeans live hidden in a volcano for thousands of years, undetected despite the fact that the very surface of Sask-E seems to act like a giant sensory network. The Archaeans were the original terraformers, they started the process of converting an atmosphere of ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide into Earth-like air. Yet despite the fact that there is zero free oxygen in the Archaean air, they look exactly like humans - with lungs and noses. The humanoid Archaeans are befriended by raccoons and naked mole rats which look exactly like their Earthly counterparts, despite the toxic atmosphere. When the air-breathing humans visit the Archaeans, they simply don a mask which somehow magically extracts oxygen from the hellish atmosphere. For some reason, the air-breathing humans do not need to protect their eyes or skin from the toxic ammonia gases.

The raccoons and naked mole rats are just as smart as humans and speak like humans (The naked mole rats operate the vats that decant new creatures). Newitz carries this idea to absurd levels when later in the book the characters encounter sentient earthworms who are just as smart as humans (earthworms have roughly 300,000 neurons in their brain while humans have 86 billion. But sure, earthworms can do complex math and speak English).

The Archaeans are fretting because a planned change in the course of a river means that they will suffer a water shortage. Yet the Archaeans are living beneath a huge caldera that is filled with water!

The middle third of the novel involves characters trying to figure out how to provide transportation between all the newly built cities on Sask-E. Evil Verdance insists that a network of trains be built across the planet, despite the fact that is most environmentally destructive solution. The obvious solution would simply be to give every citizen an anti-gravity belt, but "that would be too expensive." The solution is to build flying sentient trains equipped with anti-gravity belts. How is a flying train supposed to propel its way forward through the sky?

It is not only trains that are given intelligence. All sorts of machines and inanimate objects have personalities and can talk, including the annoying front door to the Archaeans volcanic hideaway.

The moon of Sask-E is described as pear-shaped, with active volcanos. Gravity would collapse that moon into a sphere, just like every large body in our solar system is a sphere.

There are many more bad ideas than I have listed here. It was quite a slog to read a chapter or two of The Terraformers. It is a hard book to pick up and an easy one to put down.

Newitz is now on my list of authors to be avoided at all costs.