Annalee Newitz' Revolutionary Space Opera, The Terraformers

Transcript of Interview for Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon

This is Writer's Voice, and I'm Francesca Rheannon. Creating a homegrown national park to save nature:

We have to design our living spaces, the places where we play, the places where we farm, our corporate landscapes, our roadsides. All of these places have to be designed in ways that welcome nature rather than expel her. So I suggest we've got 44 million acres of lawn in this country, which is an area bigger than New England. And right now, lawn is an ecological deadscape. So let's cut that area in half. That'll give us more than 20 million acres that we can restore right where we live. And if you add up all the major national parks in this country combined, there's still less than 20 million acres. So this new restoration that we do at home is going to be the biggest national park in the country, which we're calling Homegrown National Park.

That's ecologist Doug Tallamy. Later, we talk with him about the young reader's version of his best-selling book, Nature's Best Hope. But first, we talk with Anna Lee Newitz about their terrific sci-fi novel, The Terraformers.

That's all coming up on today's Writers' Voice, in-depth conversation with writers of all genres, on the air since 2004.

Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers

Imagine a society far, far into the future, where planets are terraformed according to strict ecological principles, all life forms are designed and engineered, and all of them are persons, including sentient trains, a flying moose, and a cat who's an investigative journalist. Humans come in many configurations and genders. Some persons are free, and others are enslaved. And the titanic battle between greedy capitalism and the public interest is still going on some 60,000 years from now.

That's the world conceived by Anna Lee Newitz in their new speculative fiction novel, The Terraformers. It's both a delightful literary romp and a thought-provoking exploration of what sovereignty and democracy really mean. Publishers Weekly gave The Terraformers a starred review, saying, “Newitz performs a staggering feat of revolutionary imagination in this hopeful space opera.”

We last spoke with Anna Lee Newitz about their non-fiction book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. In The Terraformers, they imagine an answer to that question that both entertains and inspires.

FR: Anna Lee Newitz, welcome back to Writer's Voice.

AN: Thank you so much for having me.

So, we last spoke with you about a non-fiction book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember!, which is about how people can adapt to enormous changes like climate change and all kinds of destructive forces in the world. And this book, The Terraformers, is a science fiction novel that takes place some 60,000 years in the future.

Yes.

But it harkens back to our time as well. And I first want to say, the trick with this kind of genre of speculative fiction, you know, that takes place on another planet long into the future, is always to create a believable world, and you really succeed admirably.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you saying that.

And I love your characters, from the sentient doors and trains to the cat journalist and the various homo sapiens.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun coming up with all of those characters and hearing their voices in my head.

They're wonderful. So, as I said, this takes place almost 60,000 years into the future on a terraformed planet called Sask-E by a civilization that originated on Earth. So first, before we go to that origin story, give us a snapshot picture of this galactic society that has terraformed planets everywhere, including Sask-E.

So, the book really focuses on the life of Sask-E and the people who live there.

And one of the elements of realism that I was hoping to bring into the story was showing that even though you're living in a giant galactic civilization with incredible technologies, if you're living on a planet and doing your job, you might not really be thinking a lot about that bigger picture.

And so, I deliberately left certain elements of the galactic civilization vague so that I could focus in on the main character, Destry, who is an environmental engineer.

Her best friend is a sentient, talking, flying moose named Whistle. And although he doesn't talk because, of course, he's a moose, he texts through an implant in his mind.

And what we gather over the course of the book as we follow Destry and Whistle and then eventually follow their progeny into the future is that this is a society that started on Earth and continued to explore other worlds using some of the same tools that people on Earth have used to explore our own planet, which is to say they're exploring by funding their activities using the marketplace.

They're terraforming the planet Sask-E because this company is an interstellar real estate development company. So, they're funding the terraforming of the planet by selling real estate on the planet.

So, there's certain social aspects of this society that are very familiar. We see elements of capitalism or like super futuristic space capitalism. But there's also parts of the civilization that are really dramatically different. And one way that it's different is that there are robots and non-human animals who are people. So, you have a homo sapiens character whose best friend is a moose and who also is friends with a robot. And all of these people bring very different ideas to the table when it comes to how they want to organize life on a planet.

And that was part of the fun for me was imagining this unimaginable state where you could have a conversation with a moose or a beaver or a cow.

But at the same time, a recognizable framework where we see the same kinds of problems with corporate capitalism cropping up in the far future but just taking a really different form.

You know, as you say, there are many different kinds of people in this book. And I really think at the heart of the book is this society's definition of personhood. And it references a revolution that happened, you know, perhaps not too far from our own time here. The farm revolutions that ended the Anthropocene on Earth. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so this is definitely one of the world building pieces that I had fleshed out a lot in my mind. But in the book itself, we only kind of get little glimpses of it because it has happened so far in their past. It's tens of thousands of years distant from them.

And this event is basically the way I imagined it was that groups who were doing environmental work, indigenous groups doing land-back work, things like the No Dakota Access Pipeline activists, people who were trying to engage in not just reclaiming land for political reasons, but also for environmental reasons.

This is a loose group of people who in our future eventually come to basically rebuild civilization after the planet has been absolutely drowned by climate change.

And again, it's very vague because our characters in the novel are looking back at this almost like a mythological time, almost like a biblical flood or something like that.

And they have this vague sense that on Earth, the waters rose, the land masses shrank, people were hungry and starving. And this group of activists and scientists recreated agriculture and rebuilt civilization by basically inventing the technologies that allow them to have non-human animals as people. And instead of creating farms where humans tend to cows or goats, they have cows and goats speaking for themselves with the humans saying how the farms should be run.

And that is a revolution. It completely changes the way humans interact with their environment because humans are forced to confront the fact that we're just one life form among millions that actually run this planet. And that sovereignty doesn't just belong to humans, it belongs to all kinds of other life forms.

And growing out of that farm revolution, which again, distant past of the book, is a group called the Environmental Rescue Team. And they are an organization that is kind of an engineering group, kind of a first responder group, and kind of a spiritual order. Their job is to maintain balance in ecosystems.

And any time humans go to a new place, they tend to set up a small campus for Environmental Rescue Team rangers to help maintain their environment, but also to rescue people if there's a disaster.

Like if there's a fire, the Environmental Rescue Team will be there helping people out, helping people to build fire resistant communities.

And on Sask-E, the planet that we journey through in the Terraformers, there is a group of Environmental Rescue Team rangers who kind of aren't supposed to be there.

And that's actually one of the questions in the book is why are they there? Because it's a privately owned planet that's being developed by this company. Why would they have brought this public organization to come work on their planet?

But Destry, our main character, is from the ERT. And so she's kind of living out the contradiction between trying to do good for the public, trying to serve the environment, but also being aware that she's at the mercy of her corporate overlords.

And this whole notion of who is a person, I mean, first of all, I think it hearkens also to indigenous forms of thinking about the human place within our own planet. In other words, all our relations, that we are part, that we are just one of, as you said, millions of sentient beings on the planet. So that was very warming to my heart, I have to say, because it's how I see the other beings I share the planet with.

But it is also at the heart of the structure and some of the questions that drive this wonderful novel, The Terraformers, in the sense of the intelligence assessment or InAss ratings of different creatures and how this private corporation manages, I mean, first of all, you know, the whole notion of private property, every living being is designed and then decanted, so there are issues of intellectual property, you know, the private corporation creates you, you're its slave, and it also will create different gradations of intelligence depending on how it wants to use you. So talk about how capitalism functions, the private functions on this planet.

Yeah, it's, as you said, it's a huge question throughout the book, and it's really complicated and that's one of the things that I wanted to highlight is that personhood is complicated, not just because we have in this story this miraculous type of science that allows us to have non-human animals who are people, but also because every step forward toward autonomy that these characters have or sovereignty is matched by an equal force pushing them backward into servitude or labor that is absolutely not chosen. And we see characters who are caught in all different parts of that web.

And one of the more pernicious aspects of the capitalism or corporate control in this book that you brought up was the intelligence assessment ratings. And this is something that I think about a lot because I feel like especially right now in the United States, the idea of intelligence has really been weaponized and commodified because of course we're in an era where people are trying to sell artificial intelligence and redefine what intelligence means and how much it's worth, not just financially how much it's worth, but also socially how much it's worth.

But also, there are a lot of people who are white supremacists or white supremacist adjacent politicians who want to claim that certain racial groups are smarter than other groups and that therefore, meritocracy means that just naturally white people rise to the top, which is a complete lie. It's not based in science. It's based in a long tradition of superstition and pseudoscience that goes way, way back to the 19th century.

And I wanted to think about how that same kind of idea would play itself out in a far future world where people were actually being built to certain specifications. So if I'm building a cow who is a person, and I have a genetic engineering machine that allows me to do that, either I can just say building a person means they have the capacity to have the same kind of conscious thoughts as a human being or any other creature and leave it at that.

But as a capitalist who wants to mobilize labor and who wants to claim that there's some kind of meritocracy, and when I say capitalist here, we're talking about bad guy capitalists. This isn't your corner bodega store owner who's just trying to make a buck. This is like extreme billionaire behavior or in this future, who knows what level we'd be at, quadrillionaire, Google-aire behavior.

And so what they do is these companies invent what they call intelligence assessment ratings. And they create creatures who are people, but some of them are rated as people. Some are rated as mounts, meaning that they can be ridden on like a moose or a horse or a cow. And then some have even lower rankings like animal is one ranking, and another ranking is called blessed. And the blessed have their brains essentially damaged so that when they speak, they can only speak about their work. And the idea is that that will make them much more productive in a kind of capitalist view.

And mounts, like the character Whistle, the flying texting moose, their brains are damaged so that when they speak or text, they can only use single syllable words unless they're referring to some specific name. So they can name their friends or whatever if they have multiple syllable names. Any other word has to be a monosyllable.

And the idea is that it makes them appear to be foolish. It makes them appear stupid so that other workers who have the human rating don't mind using them as labor, you know, as slave labor. You know, they're the mount, you drive around on top of this moose or you drive around on top of a horse.

And what we discover in the book really quite early on is that this type of damage that's being done to these creatures minds doesn't actually change how they think they're all just as smart as each other. They all have the ability to have ethical reason and to deduce things from evidence, but their ability to express themselves has been damaged.

So it's a nice metaphor for the ways that groups who've been marginalized are refused access to platforms where they might speak their mind, or who are, you know, deprived of literacy so that it's harder for them to communicate in writing.

I wanted to call attention to, you know, the tricks of meritocracy, the ways that we convince ourselves that meritocracy is the right system and that there is something like intelligence that we can measure.

So because you can't really measure intelligence, these companies have come up with these like fake categories that are essentially cosmetic, you know, it's just what you can say and what you can't say, not what you think. So like I said, it's very complicated and it leads to a lot of characters being unheard, and then sometimes figuring out ways to get heard.

And I just really wanted to think through all those questions of how do you make yourself heard when you live in a system that is claiming that you're stupid, a system that's claiming that when you talk you sound ridiculous, and that you shouldn't really be allowed to talk anyway unless you're talking about your job.

And of course, the ruling class believes their own hype about it. They believe that they actually are stupid.

But this society is not just predatory capitalist society. There's also a counterweight to that, a counter society, the hidden city of the spider city that was created by, you know, a group of Neanderthal-like hominins, who were the first terraformers on the planet and were supposed to have all died out, but didn't. So tell us about them and their society, which is quite different.

Yeah, so this is a group of terraformers who were created by the same corporation that has created Destry and all of her friends, but they ran away and hid underneath a volcano where they wouldn't be found by satellite and where their technologies would be masked by many layers of rock.

So they have an incredibly beautiful, complex underground city, and they are a type of hominin that's called homodiversus, which is, I say, it's a sort of a knockoff homo sapiens.

They kind of look a little bit Neanderthal because they have barrel chests, and they've been designed to thrive in an atmosphere that's similar to very early Earth. They've had far less oxygen in the atmosphere. So that's another reason why it's good for them to live underground, because they can have the right mix of gases.

And they have created a radical democracy based around having a city council whose members change on a very regular basis. They have a very complicated system of voting where the minority voice, there's always the majority wins as in typical democracy, but then the minority is always given a concession. And so some of their most bitter political debates are over not who has won and what the winner will get, but what the minority loser side will get as their concession after the vote has been taken.

So they are also a group that does not believe in intelligence assessment. They have a system where everyone is a person no matter what. If you're alive, you're a person. If you're dead, you're not. Well, we don't know for sure what they think about dead people, but if you're not a living being, like if you're a rock, you're probably not a person. So I could imagine the philosophers among the Spider City people saying like, but maybe a rock could be a person under some circumstances. We don't know.

And that's the kind of thinkers that they are.

And Destry and Whistle find the city along with a few other environmental rescue team workers, and they're completely shocked. They've been told their whole lives that this group of people had gone extinct. And then they discover that not only are they not extinct, they have this thriving huge city and a very different perspective on the history of the planet.

And that city and its beliefs becomes kind of the seed for what I call deep revolution in this book. And when I say deep revolution, I'm referring to the idea of deep time. Because this is a book about how revolution just does not happen overnight, and it is a multi-generational project. And so when Destry and the people of Spider City encounter each other, they make some decisions that set in motion a revolution that takes centuries before it finally erupts into direct action and changes in the laws on the planet.

The Terraformers is absolutely a fascinating exploration over these thousands of years, well hundreds of years, I guess, some 1,500 years. I just wondered, what about this longevity? Why are people so long-lived in this culture?

So that's, I have to admit, the idea of people living for hundreds of years or even thousands of years is kind of, it's a science fiction trope. You see it a lot in far future science fiction where the idea is that these people have been engineered to survive for much longer than a wild type human or a wild type moose would.

They have all kinds of systems in their bodies. At one point, they refer to a synthetic microbiome, which I never go into, but in my head was really important. The idea is that they're probably full of basically nanobots that are constantly repairing their DNA, constantly repairing damage, neurological damage, and maintaining them in a healthy state for potentially, one character does live for thousands of years, but they're not going to be able to survive for a long time. And they're not going to be able to survive for thousands of years because she's quite wealthy and has access to all kinds of fancy treatments.

So it was partly a science fiction trope and partly because I really wanted to tell the story of deep revolution and deep time and show characters living through these long periods of time so that they could witness things like what is it like when an ecosystem is in balance and goes out of balance, collapses, and then comes back up again.

That's something that I could never witness in one lifetime as a regular human. I am witnessing the jagged edge here of climate change and what it's going to do to our planet, but if I could live for another couple thousand years, I would be able to witness the oceans rising and I would be able to see what happened to farmland after something like that.

So I kind of don't crave to see that on Earth, but it would definitely, having that perspective would alter our relationship with the environment, I believe.

Well, given with what's happening with the ice sheets in Greenland, it may take far shorter than thousands of years to witness truly catastrophic sea level rise, but that's a conversation for a different book. Annalee Newitz, in The Terraformers, there's this wonderful story that develops around transit.

Yes.

There is the creation, the invention of a new species, these intelligent trains, but why transit? Why did transit become the fulcrum around which you dealt with issues of public and private and personhood?

I mean, there's a ton of reasons. One simple reason is that I love public transit myself and I ride trains all the time and I think a lot about train life and maybe what the trains are thinking, but also I think that as many philosophers far more sophisticated than me have said, one of the main types of freedom that humans can grant each other is the freedom of mobility, the freedom to cross borders, the freedom to move from one place to another.

And I think public transit is in many ways a utopian expression of human community. It's about making mobility accessible to all.

And in this case on this planet, they have a chance to build a truly revolutionary form of mobility which joins every city on the planet. It's a mega continent, so it's really every city on this one giant continent, which is something that it's really hard for us to imagine here on earth now. I suppose airplanes kind of join nearly every city on the planet, but in reality, that's not true. We can't freely pass into any nation that we wish.

And I also wanted to give people a way to think about transit not just as like an annoying thing that makes noise outside your window, but as a kind of force on its own, a kind of political force, but also a kind of sweet and gentle friend, which is why I created these characters who are sentient trains and they run the train system.

And they're very delightful people. They love strategy games and they love to sometimes move their consciousness from their train body into a smaller, more human-sized body so they can go hang out in the cities that they service as trains.

And for me, public transit just brings together so many wishes that I have for the future of humanity, basically, that we would be free to move, that we would have good public spaces that were well tended and well cared for, and that would hopefully bring us together in new ways and allow us to appreciate our difference in new ways as well.

So yeah, that character of the train, I had been thinking about them for a long, long time before I started writing the book, so I knew we were going to end there.

And of course the train falls in love with a cat who's an investigative journalist, and that adds another element of the public sphere to their relationship because the train is bringing mobility, and then the train's lover, this cat, is creating a public sphere of open communication where people learn the truth about what's happened throughout the planet's history.

And so to me, those are great heroes, and they're also frickin' adorable. It's a train and a cat. I want the future of our public sphere to be cute and cuddly as well as open and revolutionary and granting sovereignty to all who need it.

I have to say they were my two favorite characters.

Yeah, I love them.

You said in the beginning of our conversation here that the original Earth society that had created the farm revolutions was something that was much more developed in your mind than what appears in this book. And I was thinking as I was reading this book that I would love to read a book about those farm revolutions. So I wonder if you're considering writing a prequel.

I'm not. I have thought about writing a short story that's sort of set in between the first and second parts of the book at the bar called the Tongue Forks, which is like one of my favorite places in the book. It's like kind of a futuristic version of like a queer burlesque bar, and with lots of cosplay thrown in.

I think my novel Autonomous, which is my first novel, I've been thinking of that as kind of a prequel to the Terraformers. It's definitely set in the same timeline and that's a book that I think takes place sort of right before the farm revolutions, or maybe right alongside the farm revolutions. And it's about a robot and a human who are trying to figure out their relationship to one another.

But yeah, you know, here's the thing. The farm revolutions, if you really want to know like what they might be like, I think pay attention to land back movements, you know. I think that those are the seeds of what I hope the farm revolutions will be. And so I'm just staying tuned to see where those go.

Well, that's a great advice, as a matter of fact. And this has just been a delight to talk with you, Annalie Newitz, about your wonderful novel, The Terraformers. Thank you so much.

Thank you again for having me.

Go to the Writer's Voice website for a link to an excerpt from The Terraformers. And subscribe to Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.