The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

So.

I'll just say that I AM a fan of Newitz, generally, and I really DID see a lot of potential for this book. I mean, here we are, far-future, likely all our animal cousins uplifted a-la Brin, and we might have a rollicking adventure with a moose sidekick across another world.

And with that, we DID get something like that.

But then we had to have a book that was more like Becky Chambers's style, with the warm fuzzies and systemic problems solved mostly by sweet-toothing our way through the adventure.

We have horribly invasive Homo Sapiens limiting the communication centers, sometimes the intelligence, of all these other animals. Between the strong-arm tactics, the invasive monitoring, the whole corporate-structure-is-evil feel, we get whole segregated communities exuding enough subtext to choke a moose.

And honestly? Because it's played so straight, without any true nods to just how close it resembles our world and just how closely we can read some of these species as races, it just feels -- icky.

It tries to pull off the feel-good, but instead, I feel like I've been wallowing in creepy animatronics-land. It didn't help with the pole-dancing mole-people.


Anyway, it just didn't work for me. At all. I guess I'm getting tired with write-on-editorial-demand Chambers lookalikes, too. I feel like this could have been pretty great if it was a much harder SF grounded in a harder ecology-fiction mode. Hell, that would have been extremely TOPICAL for today, too.

Instead, it was as soft an SF as you could ever desire.

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