This review ran long, so to sum up: this book is challenging, extraordinarily creative, and very intelligently crafted. It’s not particularly “satisfying” per se - it’s too realistically messy for that - but it’s one of the more remarkable journeys I’ve ever been on.
The protagonists of this book are terraformers on a privately-held planet, working to turn a barren rock into a Pleistecine paradise ready to be sold off as valuable, virgin real estate. The conflict implied there is the conflict of the entire book. One cannot craft a functioning, balanced, sustainable ecosystem from nothing without a deep and abiding respect for the work one is doing. And yet the ones in charge do *not* have that same respect - they want a planet that looks good enough on brochures to turn a profit. Anything past that towards real sustainability goes against the bottom line.
The terraforming process takes thousands of years - though people can live that long in this book, if they’re wealthy and powerful enough. There are three sections to the story. The first is set at the end of the terraforming process, as the corporate overlords are starting to put the planet on the market. The second section takes place while the initial settlements are being constructed. The final part is when the cities have been built, and the corporations and residents are determining what society will look like.
All of this takes place about 60,000 years in the future. There are no aliens in this book, but “human” no longer means what it once did. What matters is whether or not someone is a person. They can be a cow or a train or a moose or a naked mole rat, if they are sentient, they are a person with rights. Or they would have rights, if they didn’t live on a privately-owned world where they were literally owned by the corporation that owns the planet and were created specifically to terraform the place.
As you can probably get from this review, this book has a lot going on. Questions of gender and personhood. Preserving the environment vs development. Capitalism. Planned obsolescence. The list goes on.
One I didn’t expect, but give Newitz full credit for not shying away from: dating and relationships. We’ve gotten used, to some degree (not as much as we should have, but better than we used to be) to saying that biology doesn’t matter. So long as everyone is a consenting adult, a romantic relationship is perfectly fine. How does that play out when a sentient tractor is interested in a sentient panda? The logical, rational, non-hypocritical answer is that it’s perfectly fine, but it was still strange to read about that sort of thing.
Not that prejudice doesn’t exist in this world. There is definitely a pro-homo sapiens bias in many ways, and that plays a large role in everything too.
Like I said, this book has a tremendous amount going on. The ultimate ending wasn’t what I would call “satisfying,” because this book was too faithful to telling a realistic story. (Within the science fiction conceptualization of things. You know what I mean.) You don’t get neat endings in real life with so many competing interests. But this was an utterly fascinating book to read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is up for a challenge.
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