OK, so truth is, I picked up Terraformers at the same time I picked The future of another timeline (from the same author) and started reading this book just after reading This is how you lose the time war. I was really interested in continuing reading time travel stories, liked what I read but at the same time, that was not exactly what I wanted to read at the time. It just didn’t feel right. So I put it aside, read a whole bunch of other things, then picked up The Terraformers from my pile on a whim.

And damn, I love this book.

Long story short: a company has been given a concession to terraform a planet before selling it. At some point in the process, one of the terrain engineer discovers that part of the team from eons ago went AWOL and set up kind of a stowaway community hidden in a volcano.

As much as this summary is true to the premise of the story, the book goes much deeper. A first realisation is that the company considers the workers first as its property and then as expendable. The workers mentioned earlier ? They were build for the initial conditions of the planet (think lava flow, volcanoes and barely photosynthesis happening in the oceans) and to engineer the conditions so that the next team (the one who will take advantage of more stable landmasses and more oxygen in the air) to create an earth-like ecosystem. And then, to die or to be disposed of. Them going awol is, from the point of view of the company, like having your stapler hiding in your drawer and plotting a revolution with the other stationeries.

Even this bad comparison allows me to get to one of the other points of the book: antispecism. The first level being that with the company using different steps of the evolution of the Homo genus, basically both are recognised personhood. Then again, it is also included that gene edition goes beyond that and human, provided enough money, can create a haute-couture body (classified as Homo Diversus) with whatever modification they want, and transfer their conscience into it. Add a bunch of robot part into the mix. And then add into the mix that in the remote past, some animals were given the same status and their intelligence recognised.

You know I’m just as intelligent as I always was, right? The only difference is now you have to listen to me.

Even beyond that, it goes into the very cyberpunk aspects of life from, to and for a company. Working for or being slaved to a faceless company. The whole company politics that will actively try to erase the soul of the persons working for or with the company, no matter how high or low or side way they are in the hierarchy.

It’s also very politic (if what I listed above was not political enough) by confronting the ultraliberal, top-down, company-first “governance” of the companies in charge of the terraforming or building the cities and the free-spirit anarchist / direct democracy / self governing model of the independent city.

Final word

I already said it: I love this book.

The summary above do not do the book justice, neither the scope of the themes it tackles, nor how well it is written. Just go for it.

And while you are at it, give a listen to the author’s podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. That’s the quickest I have gone from discovering the podcast to becoming a Patreon.