The Terraformers
May. 2nd, 2023 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Terraformers, Annalee Newitz, 2023 novel. This is a weird book and everything else, which is spoilery, goes behind this cut.
Ok, this read so weirdly to me as a novel that I was half-expecting some kind of author's note at the end like "this novel grew out of a series of tabletop role-playing sessions my pod played during the pandemic", which would have explained so much about the structure and pacing. A really odd mix of giant time-jumps coupled with major decisions/changes being made and implemented overnight.
I did not realize, going in, that it was going to be three sections about three different characters, and it seemed to me that at the end of the first section we were finally getting to "the real conflicts", after a bunch of setup, so it was super-jarring to jump away and never explore that. At the end of the first section, the (enslaved) ranger protagonist, who loves roaming the wilderness, has brokered a treaty that will protect a bunch of people at the cost of her own freedom to ever leave the city again, and meanwhile her friend, a cyborg moose, has accidentally been cured of an artificial speech limitation that only let him speak single-syllable words (which is *such* a roleplaying gimmick, come on), and I thought we were going to... spend time with how those changes felt to them, and how they coped with them? But, no, suddenly it's 700 years later. I was less surprised when the second section also set up and then left unresolved what felt like a a big underlying emotional conflict (two characters maybe interested in a romantic relationship, but one is enslaved, plus maybe an imbalance of feelings, plus some significant ethical disagreement) while the nominal plot concluded. That time the third section had a brief glimpse of those characters implying that it did all get resolved somehow, but heck knows how. There were other things like that too, like in the first two sections it seemed like a blockade of off-world contact was a big deal and a big structural problem, and then in the third section that problem had suddenly casually been resolved, which, ok, that's fine if that's not a part of the story Newitz wanted to write about, but it kinda thwarts my ability to identify what I'm supposed to be caring about and then be satisfied or surprised with subsequent events. Like, I just like to feel like there's some kind of arc.
And then there's the slavery problem. Lurking in the background (foreground?) of this book is the fact that it's a slavery system, with widespread enslavement, and this is taken for granted by absolutely everybody. Some characters seem to have some feelings that it personally sucks, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of abolition movement, or belief that there could *not* be slavery - maybe slavery has been such an established fact for the past 50000 years (approximately when this book is set) that it's just obvious that civilization has always and will always involve slavery - and, okay, that is certainly a bold worldbuilding choice, but I feel like Newitz didn't really... do anything with it? (Or at least not anything good?) The aforementioned second-section conflict involves an enslaved character objecting to the invention of a new species of sentient aircraft for specific mass-transit purposes, saying that *he* was custom-made for a specific purpose and he hates it, and the other character, the love interest's, answer is that they'll make sure that in this specific case these specific aircraft aren't forced, not, like, considering any general problem with this practice. And then we cut to the third section and conveniently the aircraft just loooves being a mass-transit aircraft! And also somehow the enslaved character is implied to have gotten enough freedom to go live with the love interest after all, maybe because some offscreen corporate-politics events got his owner fired at some point, and another minor enslaved character, with a speech limitation even worse than the cyborg moose (every sentence has to contain a reference to their job, so, either food or cooking) is shown to have escaped and found a workaround. So, hey, all's well that ends well, and Newitz is able to back the story away from dealing with consequences of the slavery system. (Newitz further avoids some of the awful parts of what actual USian chattel slavery looked like with worldbuilding details like having all people grown in vats as adults, so there's no, like, forced breeding, and the "parenting" socialization process only lasting a few months, so there isn't separation of families.) To me, it ended up feeling like the implication was something like "if the yoke is light enough, people will bear it and get on with their lives", and I felt that this was an uncomfortable way to handle slavery as a worldbuilding detail. (I have read a couple of reviews, and nobody else seemed to have had this reaction, so, I don't know. Maybe other people read it as more critical than I did.)
Other than that there is some interesting worldbuilding stuff here! It's portrayed as pretty casually easy to design a new species (the aircraft, described in the book as "flying trains" possibly because it's environmentalist dogma right now that Trains Are Good, while Planes Are Bad, but, look, the mass transit that doesn't run on tracks and is able to fly anywhere it wants to is actually airplanes, not trains, sorry), or to uplift an existing animal species to sentience (someone decides to uplift earthworms, and this apparently isn't particularly harder than it was to uplift cats or moose or naked mole rats), but there isn't a huge proliferation of species because species are only created or uplifted when there's a specific purpose or niche. And also what does "species" even mean when there is no reproduction and everyone sentient seems to be running a fairly similar kind of cognition and personality - like I say "species" but maybe I mean something more like "body plan". I didn't find the cow person dramatically "cow-like" or the cat "cat-like". Newitz dances right up to "if everyone is just people does that mean they can all have sex with each other" without ever quite crossing the bestiality line - two different hominid subtypes have sex, but when the train decides to have sex with the cat, the train switches out of their hominid-form remote-control body and into a beaver-cat animal form remote. So, maybe cross-species sex is taboo? Or maybe it's personal preference? Newitz isn't saying, but it was interesting to see them go there at all... I'm trying to think of other writers who have thought about how uplifted sentient Earth animals fit into the bestiality/xeno spectrum (where bestiality is one of the Big Gross Taboos (for good reason IMO!) but sex with humanform aliens is mainstream enough that Kirk can be implied to do it on broadcast TV in the 60s, as long as they're women and played by white actresses). Is there some kind of unspoken forbidden crush between a young dolphin and a young human in Startide Rising, I think?
To get back away from sex, some interesting stuff about whether and to what extent biology is destiny. "Like all creatures we find it satisfying to do things that our bodies excel at", a sentient lava-tunnel-digger says, but it wasn't exactly clear to me why some people were made as cats or cows. (The moose are moose to be rideable, and the speech limitations are an evil-corporation tactic to make them seem less intelligent and lower status/subservient to their human-form riders.) I guess the implication is that the corporation had some particular purpose for cats and cows (and beavers and naked mole rats, etc). They are all shown to be "human-like" in having a variety of jobs and hobbies if free to choose them. "Parents" seem to mostly be same-species, although everyone thinks a hominid will be a fine parent for a train, although the train does have to get special flying lessons from a robot auntie. (Robots can apparently take on whatever configurations they want, including "largely disembodied/distributed around the city as doors". It wasn't actually entirely clear to me whether the trains were bots or bio. We never see any humans or animals other than the trains operating remote bodies, except that book opens with the ranger killing a hominid remote being operated by a human off-planet.) There's never any mention of, like, moose who wish they were human-shaped, or humans who wish they were moose-shaped, so maybe the brains are shaped enough to the bodies to feel specifically identified with the bodies. I don't know, interesting worldbuilding! (Although it also felt like a DM who didn't want to have to come up with stats for an infinite selection of animals, and gave players a limited list... hm...)
Anyways, I don't have a big conclusion here. Interesting book, not IMO entirely successful, but definitely interesting.
Ok, this read so weirdly to me as a novel that I was half-expecting some kind of author's note at the end like "this novel grew out of a series of tabletop role-playing sessions my pod played during the pandemic", which would have explained so much about the structure and pacing. A really odd mix of giant time-jumps coupled with major decisions/changes being made and implemented overnight.
I did not realize, going in, that it was going to be three sections about three different characters, and it seemed to me that at the end of the first section we were finally getting to "the real conflicts", after a bunch of setup, so it was super-jarring to jump away and never explore that. At the end of the first section, the (enslaved) ranger protagonist, who loves roaming the wilderness, has brokered a treaty that will protect a bunch of people at the cost of her own freedom to ever leave the city again, and meanwhile her friend, a cyborg moose, has accidentally been cured of an artificial speech limitation that only let him speak single-syllable words (which is *such* a roleplaying gimmick, come on), and I thought we were going to... spend time with how those changes felt to them, and how they coped with them? But, no, suddenly it's 700 years later. I was less surprised when the second section also set up and then left unresolved what felt like a a big underlying emotional conflict (two characters maybe interested in a romantic relationship, but one is enslaved, plus maybe an imbalance of feelings, plus some significant ethical disagreement) while the nominal plot concluded. That time the third section had a brief glimpse of those characters implying that it did all get resolved somehow, but heck knows how. There were other things like that too, like in the first two sections it seemed like a blockade of off-world contact was a big deal and a big structural problem, and then in the third section that problem had suddenly casually been resolved, which, ok, that's fine if that's not a part of the story Newitz wanted to write about, but it kinda thwarts my ability to identify what I'm supposed to be caring about and then be satisfied or surprised with subsequent events. Like, I just like to feel like there's some kind of arc.
And then there's the slavery problem. Lurking in the background (foreground?) of this book is the fact that it's a slavery system, with widespread enslavement, and this is taken for granted by absolutely everybody. Some characters seem to have some feelings that it personally sucks, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of abolition movement, or belief that there could *not* be slavery - maybe slavery has been such an established fact for the past 50000 years (approximately when this book is set) that it's just obvious that civilization has always and will always involve slavery - and, okay, that is certainly a bold worldbuilding choice, but I feel like Newitz didn't really... do anything with it? (Or at least not anything good?) The aforementioned second-section conflict involves an enslaved character objecting to the invention of a new species of sentient aircraft for specific mass-transit purposes, saying that *he* was custom-made for a specific purpose and he hates it, and the other character, the love interest's, answer is that they'll make sure that in this specific case these specific aircraft aren't forced, not, like, considering any general problem with this practice. And then we cut to the third section and conveniently the aircraft just loooves being a mass-transit aircraft! And also somehow the enslaved character is implied to have gotten enough freedom to go live with the love interest after all, maybe because some offscreen corporate-politics events got his owner fired at some point, and another minor enslaved character, with a speech limitation even worse than the cyborg moose (every sentence has to contain a reference to their job, so, either food or cooking) is shown to have escaped and found a workaround. So, hey, all's well that ends well, and Newitz is able to back the story away from dealing with consequences of the slavery system. (Newitz further avoids some of the awful parts of what actual USian chattel slavery looked like with worldbuilding details like having all people grown in vats as adults, so there's no, like, forced breeding, and the "parenting" socialization process only lasting a few months, so there isn't separation of families.) To me, it ended up feeling like the implication was something like "if the yoke is light enough, people will bear it and get on with their lives", and I felt that this was an uncomfortable way to handle slavery as a worldbuilding detail. (I have read a couple of reviews, and nobody else seemed to have had this reaction, so, I don't know. Maybe other people read it as more critical than I did.)
Other than that there is some interesting worldbuilding stuff here! It's portrayed as pretty casually easy to design a new species (the aircraft, described in the book as "flying trains" possibly because it's environmentalist dogma right now that Trains Are Good, while Planes Are Bad, but, look, the mass transit that doesn't run on tracks and is able to fly anywhere it wants to is actually airplanes, not trains, sorry), or to uplift an existing animal species to sentience (someone decides to uplift earthworms, and this apparently isn't particularly harder than it was to uplift cats or moose or naked mole rats), but there isn't a huge proliferation of species because species are only created or uplifted when there's a specific purpose or niche. And also what does "species" even mean when there is no reproduction and everyone sentient seems to be running a fairly similar kind of cognition and personality - like I say "species" but maybe I mean something more like "body plan". I didn't find the cow person dramatically "cow-like" or the cat "cat-like". Newitz dances right up to "if everyone is just people does that mean they can all have sex with each other" without ever quite crossing the bestiality line - two different hominid subtypes have sex, but when the train decides to have sex with the cat, the train switches out of their hominid-form remote-control body and into a beaver-cat animal form remote. So, maybe cross-species sex is taboo? Or maybe it's personal preference? Newitz isn't saying, but it was interesting to see them go there at all... I'm trying to think of other writers who have thought about how uplifted sentient Earth animals fit into the bestiality/xeno spectrum (where bestiality is one of the Big Gross Taboos (for good reason IMO!) but sex with humanform aliens is mainstream enough that Kirk can be implied to do it on broadcast TV in the 60s, as long as they're women and played by white actresses). Is there some kind of unspoken forbidden crush between a young dolphin and a young human in Startide Rising, I think?
To get back away from sex, some interesting stuff about whether and to what extent biology is destiny. "Like all creatures we find it satisfying to do things that our bodies excel at", a sentient lava-tunnel-digger says, but it wasn't exactly clear to me why some people were made as cats or cows. (The moose are moose to be rideable, and the speech limitations are an evil-corporation tactic to make them seem less intelligent and lower status/subservient to their human-form riders.) I guess the implication is that the corporation had some particular purpose for cats and cows (and beavers and naked mole rats, etc). They are all shown to be "human-like" in having a variety of jobs and hobbies if free to choose them. "Parents" seem to mostly be same-species, although everyone thinks a hominid will be a fine parent for a train, although the train does have to get special flying lessons from a robot auntie. (Robots can apparently take on whatever configurations they want, including "largely disembodied/distributed around the city as doors". It wasn't actually entirely clear to me whether the trains were bots or bio. We never see any humans or animals other than the trains operating remote bodies, except that book opens with the ranger killing a hominid remote being operated by a human off-planet.) There's never any mention of, like, moose who wish they were human-shaped, or humans who wish they were moose-shaped, so maybe the brains are shaped enough to the bodies to feel specifically identified with the bodies. I don't know, interesting worldbuilding! (Although it also felt like a DM who didn't want to have to come up with stats for an infinite selection of animals, and gave players a limited list... hm...)
Anyways, I don't have a big conclusion here. Interesting book, not IMO entirely successful, but definitely interesting.
