“The Terraformers” is less a novel than three novellas, each one foregrounding distinct but related groups of characters across three different eras of Sask-E’s existence. In the first section, Ranger Destry and her Mount, Whistle — a sentient, flying moose — struggle to preserve the planet’s nascent ecology against the interests of a micromanaging V.P. The delicate balance on the emerging planet depends on company workers like Destry being its only inhabitants — but when she and her fellow Rangers find evidence of a thriving underground civilization, they have to decide how far they’ll go to question, and oppose, their owners’ project. Destry’s actions create the conditions for the next two sections, in which Sask-E goes from a Pleistocene-like ecology bare of any humans to a dense urbanity full of landlords and renters of multiple species.
There’s a lot to enjoy and admire here. No one writes weird vulnerable intimacy quite like Newitz, whose books always contain at least one casually delivered insight that quietly explodes the mind. “The Terraformers” contains several — but those insights and ideas end up provoking more questions than they can effectively explore. Using a post-scarcity world to tell an allegory about late capitalism is an awkward endeavor; though this novel is about literally building a world, it invites a lot of world-building questions, and the focus on the planet’s development ends up crowding out the development of its characters. By the third and final section, our protagonists are a flying train and a cat who’s also an investigative journalist, but they sound almost identical to each other and to the talking cow and bipedal robot who preceded them.
Newitz describes artificial “limiters” that are built into the minds of people who’ve been created for specific purposes, keeping them from expressing a wide range of thoughts and emotions. It was frustrating to feel as if there were a limiter on the book itself, preventing it from examining its conflicts and compromises to the extent they deserve.
Freya Marske’s A RESTLESS TRUTH (388 pp., Tordotcom, $27.99) is the second book in the Edwardian fantasy series she began with “A Marvellous Light,” and it’s thrilling and lovely, with the same enthusiastic attention paid to character depth and period detail that made its predecessor such a pleasure.
In the first book, Edwin Courcey and Robin Blyth uncovered a conspiracy that put every magician in England at risk; the second opens with Robin’s younger sister, Maud, sailing to England from America in the company of a taciturn magician she has recruited to help stop the conspiracy. But on the first day of the voyage, Maud’s companion is murdered over a legendary artifact, and it’s up to Maud to retrieve it, unmask her enemies and survive the rest of the trip. To do so she’ll need allies — like Violet Debenham, a dashing and provocative actress-turned-heiress, and a magician in her own right.
