What it is
Annalee Newitz's 2023 novel spans thousands of years on a planet being terraformed for eventual human colonization. The story follows rangers, city builders, and activists across three time periods as they fight to protect the rights of all intelligent beings, from humans to robots to sentient moose, against a corporation that sees the planet purely as real estate. The novel explores cooperation between species, democratic planning, and the tension between corporate development and ecological stewardship.
Why we picked this
The Terraformers takes solarpunk's core ideas and scales them to planetary proportions. Newitz imagines what democratic urban planning looks like when every species gets a vote, what transportation networks emerge when design serves community rather than profit, and what happens when the rights of nature are legally enforceable. The corporate antagonist makes the political stakes tangible: this is not just imagination but a dramatization of real conflicts between extraction and stewardship.
Key takeaways
- The novel imagines multi-species democracy where intelligent beings of all kinds (biological, mechanical, hybrid) participate in governance and urban planning.
- Transportation networks in the book are designed around ecological principles: no roads through habitat corridors, gravity trains instead of combustion vehicles.
- Newitz (founder of io9, former Ars Technica editor) brings science journalism rigor to the worldbuilding, with plausible biology, engineering, and political systems.