Yes, Obviously The Terraformers Is A Satire, I Mean Come On

Spoiler Warning - Spoilers Below. I’m not sure how much they matter… the fun of something like Harrison Bergeron or Idiocracy isn’t any sort of reveal (“dumb people do dumb things” isn’t a surprise) its in watching the shenanigans (It’s What Plants Crave!). But I should at least mention it.

This is an expansion on my book review of The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz. In that review, I assert that this novel is obviously a satire of a certain type of modern-day enviromentalist. It’s lampooning the bougie-communist rich kids that can only exist in a modern economy of billions of people that want to live in harmony with nature while showered with the wealth of industrialized capitalism.

For starters - the beliefs of the cult are farcical. Their morality is directly tied to carbon emissions. They believe that they are morally superior to all others because they are “carbon-negative” and express shock when other people don’t agree that this makes them better. This holds even when they are the only people on a verdant planet. There are maybe a couple thousands humans on the entire planet and their primary focus is on carbon emissions? How illiterate do you have to be to think being either carbon negative OR carbon positive matters at all when there’s less than a large town’s worth of humans around? Obvs this isn’t an environmental stance, it’s a religious one, and it’s hilarious that they care in this situation. They were placed on a forest planet specifically to highlight how absurd and hilarious it is. :)

In case you weren’t convinced by this, in the second section the primary plot revolves around setting up a public transit system (more proof that this is satire, only a satire could get away with making something so trivial something of such earth-shattering importance :) ). At one point the railroad system compromises to make themselves more acceptable by agreeing to put in BIODEGRADABLE RAILS!!! OMG, my dudes, biodegradable rails in your railroads!!! This is the good shit! :D

The environmentalists (“Rangers”) have made a “compact” with the animals of old earth, to bring them into society and uplift them. Except it is explicitly stated by our protagonists that what they actually have done is put human brains inside animal bodies! They didn’t “bring in the animals” at all, they replaced them entirely with humans that have animal bodies. This is made extra-clear in a scene where they stumble across actual cows without human brains in them and are disgusted that such creatures still live.

(Speaking of which, there’s some distinct body horror in this novel. In one part we learn that they are putting human minds into *earthworm bodies*. Can you even imagine the horror of being a human trapped inside an earthworm?? It still makes me shudder, over a month later, and the Rangers were totally thrilled by it.)

The Rangers also don’t believe in money, which introduces a number of difficulties. The most hilarious is how they solve the problem of public transit. Anti-grav vehicles need a human mind to pilot them for Reasons. PAYING somebody to pilot a machine would be capitalistic exploitation that they cannot countenance. They can’t make automatic trains either, because the Rangers consider it grossly immoral to create a machine without personhood and a brain. (I’m not sure how far this extends… they DO have automatic doors, but the doors we see have a human mind running them. An actual machine intelligence with personhood runs the automatic doors and other devices in one of the Ranger’s cities. I’m don’t know what would happen if someone were to accidentally create a door without a mind running it. The Rangers are aghast at the idea of a vehicle without a mind in it, which is why all their vehicles are talking animals with human brains).

They get around this by, I shit you not, CREATING A SLAVE SPECIES. “Look guys, it would be immoral to pay someone to drive a train, we aren’t human garbage! Instead, we’ll create a new intelligent species of humans in train-bodies that love to drive other people because we’ve engineered them to desire that on a fundamental level. Whew, glad we averted the moral nightmare of exchanging labor for IOUs!”

And lest you think they don’t realize they’re creating a slave species, the protagonist’s boyfriend brings up that he’s maybe kinda uncomfortable with CREATING A SLAVE SPECIES. He is promptly dumped and called human garbage for this, although he is forgiven later. There’s no way you can convince me this isn’t supposed to be an indictment of the ludicrous morality of current-day extremists that demand unquestioning conformity. It would be sad if it wasn’t so ridiculously over the top. (A slave species! XD It’s perfect!)

(incidentally, the “we don’t believe in money” is a great way to demonstrate their status as rich trust-fund babies. They also have free access to expensive technology and unlimited free energy. Literally. No one ever doubts they’ll always have enough energy to power their moose-lifting anti-grav flying devices, or want for anything at all, and they have access to enough energy to carve the mantle of the planet into a dozen chunks by melting it without a second’s hesitation. Its made clear later in the book that the vast majority of the population does NOT have access to these resources, and that the Rangers never have any worry that they themselves may lose this access, even when sabotaging the people terraforming the planet)

Finally, in case you weren’t sure who IRL was being lampooned here, the Rangers in parts two and three have a bizarre pronoun ritual. We are over 50,000 years in the future. No one cares about anyone’s sex or gender or species, people can swap out their bodies, we basically have morphological freedom and the society that goes along with it. Except the Rangers still hold on to gendered pronouns. The pronouns don’t actually refer to anything, they are just chosen, apparently arbitrarily. In what I thought was the funniest single line in the entire book, a freakin’ cow — a literal bovine person — introduces herself with “using she/her.” It was brilliant. A great shibboleth that no one remarks on, because they probably don’t even remember that in the deep past the words had a reference to something physical rather than being religious signifiers.

The cult is portrayed poorly in the book, intellectually they seem almost crippled - too dumb to know they are dumb. They assume their predecessors died “of natural causes” despite knowing that A - aging has been solved, there are no “natural causes” anymore, and B - their predecessors were intentionally poisoning the atmosphere so they could no longer breath it in a mass-suicide, which seems like the opposite of “natural” to me. They refer to most non-Rangers as subhuman filth, like the memorable line bemoaning the fact that the planet, which was terraformed in the first place for human settlement, would soon be “sprayed with human diarrhea” as the settlers arrived. (Newitz leans hard into the eliminationist rhetoric of the modern environmentalist movement, which I guess is fair enough, satire that pulls its punches usually sucks.)

No really, these guys are really dumb. They have access to a doomsday weapon that will destroy much of the planet’s habited areas, and they leave the button that activates it unguarded in a room that anyone can access. To their apparent surprise, someone walks into the room and pushes the button when he isn’t getting his way. Fortunately the melting of the mantle is as easy to reverse as it was to begin, and the dude is punished by (I swear I’m not making this up) being forced to think about what he did.

I mean, what would you expect from a cult holdover from 50,000 years in the past, right?

Anyway, there is some extrapolation into the future. In another excellent twist, the evil oppressor class has been expanded from “white cis men” to “the entire homo sapiens species.” This is an obvious extension of identity politics. Once everyone has morphological freedom and you can chose to not be the oppressor species if you want… then only the people who want to remain as oppressors would retain the physical traits that identify oppressors. Spreading that to the entire species was brilliant IMO, because it drives home to present-day readers that “No, haha, you’re not safe. Of course this will be expanded without restraint until your very species is held against you and you have to change that or acknowledge yourself an enemy.” It was a good touch, but there wasn’t anything funny done with it, which was a bummer. Considering how well everything else was played for humor, I bet Newitz coulda got some mileage out of this too.

Just in case the parallels to the modern day weren’t apparent enough, the conflict between Rangers and Oppressors at the end of the novel is resolved by appeal to the government. We don’t know anything about this galactic government, it’s never given a name or any attributes. We are told that it’s OK with a private corporation indiscriminately killing thousands of people, but it draws the line at fraudulent advertising. But we’re also told this not long after the author tells us, with a wink and a nudge, that ideologues often make up ludicrous stories of past battles and heroes which obviously couldn’t possibly be true (‘they hadn’t even invented dragons yet, there’s no way he could’ve ridden into battle on one!’). That’s another great touch which makes me grin. Anyway, daddy-government shows up to make it right, and the corporations are hoisted on their own IP-petard. Hilarious, if a bit unsatisfying.

You can’t tell me this novel is supposed to make me sympathize with these Rangers. Their only saving grace is that their opponents are just as hysterically buffoonish and cartoonishly evil. Which is another mark of satire - everyone on both sides is a flailing idiot. There are no heroes, just a bunch self-important chumps that make us weep for humanity.

But perhaps more importantly for me personally… to say this isn’t a satire is to say some very ugly things about the author. It’s a claim that Annalee Newitz tried to create a plausible world with plausible people in it, but is either too lazy or too incompetent to pull it off. I think it’s rude to be that uncharitable to someone when the obvious alternative of “It’s a satire ya big dummy!” is right there, and makes for a much more fun reading experience. :)