The Terraformers

The Environmental Rescue Team is an eons-old organization tasked with monitoring and preserving ecosystems. ERT Ranger Destry Thomas is working to terraform Sask-E, a planet that is, along with every living thing on it, owned by Verdance, an intergalactic corporation. When Destry discovers a hidden city, she and her flying, talking moose Whistle, discover the truth of the planet’s history. Forced to confront her mission, her loyalties, and secrets, Destry starts a sequence of events that will echo for generations. Seven centuries later, Destry’s protégé Misha clashes with Sulfur, an engineer, as they work to create a planet transit system. Yet they come together (along with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and the irate cyborg cow Zest) when real-estate conglomerate Emerald reveals a plan to make Homo sapiens the highest life form. A millennium later, Sulfur and Misha’s remarkable child faces a tipping point, which brings Sask-E back to a choice: acquiesce to control, or alter life on the planet forever. Newitz’s (The Future of Another Timeline) prose makes accessible the novel’s discussions of Indigenous genetics, terraforming, representation, and urban development.