Mark Athitakis at the LA Times:
“The Terraformers,” Newitz’s new novel, is an ingenious, galaxy-brain book. Set in the very distant future — circa AD 59,000 — it imagines human civilization evolving to the point where we can build new worlds and effectively process new types of creatures to steward them. Destry, a ranger monitoring a planet in progress in the novel’s early going, is a “hominin,” a human-like being who can live hundreds of years, and her fellow hominins peacefully cohabitate with different species. (Her steed is a flying, talking moose-like creature; naked mole rats abound.)
But the management of Destry’s planet, Sask-E, is handled by a distant corporation, Verdance, and corporations haven’t evolved much at all. “The Terraformers” is thick with space travel, whiz-bang technology and radical re-envisioning of intra-species relationships, but Newitz’s concerns are earth-bound.
more here.