HADRON AGE SF (75)
By:
November 24, 2023
One in a series of posts about the 75 best sf adventures published during the genre’s Hadron Age era (from 2004–2023, according to HILOBROW’s periodization schema). For Josh Glenn’s Hadron Age Sci-Fi 75 list (a work in progress), click here.
Annalee Newitz’s The Terraformers (2023).
In three interlinked novellas, each of which follows several characters grappling with planet-sized issues (in addition to, you know, dating and office politics), we catch glimpses of developments on Sask-E, a planet under development as a bespoke Earth-like retreat for wealthy clients seeking real estate in a virginal Pleistocene environment. Nearly 60,000 years from now, Destry, a ranger and top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse, is working with her verbal yet apparently unintelligent flying-moose sidekick, Whistle, to terraform Sask-E… when she discovers that Verdance, the terraforming company in whose employ she’s worked for centuries, had long ago “decanted” an entire population of hominids — who’ve survived. Not only does this lost race seek independence, but they want a say in the planet’s terraforming. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the plight of the “Archaeans,” Destry’s decision will lead to an epic battle, and epochal consequences. This is a revisionist Western of sorts, in which the rangers are thoughtful and wise. Newitz leverages her work as a science journalist fascinated by the history of cities, among many other things, to bear on the question of how people (the reader’s concept of who can count as “people” — robots, naked mole rats, worms, Neanderthals — will expand) and planets can coexist. Eugenics, gentrification, and plate tectonics are also thematized. I’ve seen this story compared to a Studio Ghibli film, and I think that’s fairly accurate: Newitz’s characters are sweet, even adorable, but never in a saccharine way. Readers will long remember Destry, Whistle and his girlfriend, and Destry’s fellow ranger Misha, not to mention the sentient train and the feline investigative journalist with whom it falls in love.
Fun facts: Newitz told an interviewer that got the idea for The Terraformers from (HILOBROW friend) Stephanie Burt. “I was agonizing about what I was going to write next, and she’s like, ‘You need to write a story about nation building. You know, what happens long after the revolution.’”
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST HADRON AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES.