SNAPSHOT
Destry is a top network analyst with the Environmental Rescue Team, an ancient organization devoted to preventing ecosystem collapse. On the planet Sask-E, her mission is to terraform an Earthlike world, with the help of her taciturn moose, Whistle. But then she discovers a city that isn’t supposed to exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. Torn between loyalty to the ERT and the truth of the planet’s history, Destry makes a decision that echoes down the generations.Centuries later, Destry’s protege, Misha, is building a planetwide transit system when his worldview is turned upside-down by Sulfur, a brilliant engineer from the volcano city. Together, they uncover a dark secret about the real estate company that’s buying up huge swaths of the planet—a secret that could destroy the lives of everyone who isn’t Homo sapiens. Working with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and a very angry cyborg cow, they quietly sow seeds of subversion. But when they’re threatened with violent diaspora, Misha and Sulfur’s very unusual child faces a stark choice: deploy a planet-altering weapon, or watch their people lose everything they’ve built on Sask-E. (synopsis courtesy io9)
Far be it from me to wish the rest of 2022 away – though to be fair, it’s proving to be not that much better than 2020 and 2021 with the added horror of war to go with plague and environmental collapse – but when you have a new book from the awesomeness that is Annalee Newitz in the offing, it’s hard not to want to jump into 2023 already!
The author of Anonymous, The Future of Another Timeline and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, Newitz writes with accessibility and intelligence, both able to invest their stories with a sizeable amount of insight and information, and also have a huge amount of fun too.
Newitz is someone who loves knowing things and writing about them and it comes off every highly readable page, their passion an infectiously beguiling part of anything they write.
You can get a sense of just how good they are with an excerpt from the first chapter of The Terraformers, courtesy of io9, which looks like it’ll be a very clever hoot to read!
