![]() ![]() The same dynamic plays out here, as Verdance’s stubborn efforts to build a standard-issue train line ignore the ways communities evolve. In “Four Lost Cities,” Newitz argued that the main threats to civilizations are aggressive top-down leadership and a failure to protect the environment. “The Terraformers” may be the best novel you’ll read this year about a tragic romance between two moose-like creatures.īut Newitz is generally more comfortable operating at the macro level - 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. ![]() There are playful treks to Sask-E’s bawdier outposts and plenty of hybrid-species canoodling to boot. On a smaller scale, Newitz calls out the casual bigotry that dismisses the intellect of groups disfavored by those in power - a point made here via the “intelligence assessment” ratings Verdance uses, mockingly dubbed “InAss.”Īs an alternative, Newitz wants to celebrate the fluidity of relationships a more egalitarian society can offer. ![]() Newitz has written an entertaining study of contentious social forces, concerned with how the lower rungs of any society are (mis)treated ”The Terraformers” owes as much to E.P. One character muses that it “could be a model for how to keep the balance in the future.” Thirty-odd millennia into the future, those are still famous last words. Squabbles over who has the right to live - and where - escalate into outright battles, as the hominins strive to find a detente with the ancient community.Įventually a treaty is struck. Instead, they found a way to survive underground. sapiens neighbors, reliving the glory days of Earth.” Just as gentrification bigfoots ethnic enclaves in any major city, Verdance’s strategy threatens a whole other group: Destry and her crew discover a tribe near a volcano that was supposed to build the planet’s infrastructure and die off. But the heart of the story is a straightforward culture clash layered atop a capitalist critique.ĭestry and her fellow rangers are charged with preparing the planet for future residents and for Verdance, which promises a bespoke extraterrestrial experience: “Settle on virgin Pleistocene land, with your pure H. Here, Newitz is a thorough and meticulous world-builder, almost to a fault - the narrative often delves deep into Sask-E’s weeds. This is a much broader canvas than Newitz has worked with before their two previous novels concerned pharmaceuticals and robots (2017’s “ Autonomous”) and time travel, gender and power (2019’s “ The Future of Another Timeline”). What bad compromises are made between populations and top-down leadership? How do tribalism and caste systems undermine societies? What makes any society sustainable? And (there’s a lot of this) why can’t we have better public transit? “The Terraformers” is thick with space travel, whiz-bang technology and radical re-envisioning of intra-species relationships, but Newitz’s concerns are earth-bound. (Her steed is a flying, talking moose-like creature naked mole rats abound.)īut the management of Destry’s planet, Sask-E, is handled by a distant corporation, Verdance, and corporations haven’t evolved much at all. Destry, a ranger monitoring a planet in progress in the novel’s early going, is a “hominin,” a human-like being who can live hundreds of years, and her fellow hominins peacefully cohabitate with different species. Set in the very distant future - circa AD 59,000 - it imagines human civilization evolving to the point where we can build new worlds and effectively process new types of creatures to steward them. “ The Terraformers,” Newitz’s new novel, is an ingenious, galaxy-brain book. “Or if we think with our galaxy brains, they are temporary stops on the long road of human public history.” “Maybe all our cities are in constant cycles of centralization and dispersal,” Newitz wrote. “Cities” was an engrossing, offbeat book about urbanism, looking deep into the past with an eye on the present. Vesuvius in AD 79, wasn’t destroyed so much as reshuffled. Even Pompeii, famously buried by the eruption of Mt. In 2021, Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and science fiction novelist, published a remarkable book titled “ Four Lost Cities.” Newitz visited the sites and studied the history of four ancient civilizations and found that “dead” isn’t quite the right word for what happens to once-mighty urban centers. ![]()
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