It would be a tall order to attack Analee Newitz's latest book, The Terraformers, on ideological grounds. Newitz, an accomplished science fiction author who has also written engaging works of popular history, is working here in a mode of ecotopian science fiction that encompasses works by Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ernest Callenbach, Margaret Atwood, and others. The ideas in the novel engage productively with that legacy. The design of its far-future society has been thought through. This isn't a book that can be easily dinged for bolting trendy buzzwords onto an otherwise unreconstructed narrative, or wedging virtue-signaling scenes into a conventional space adventure.
Why, then, is The Terraformers such a mess? The reasons, I think, have less to do with the political values in the book than with the demands readers place on fiction today.
The Terraformers is set fifty thousand years in the future, in an age when humanity has figured out how to design organisms, ecosystems, and entire planets from scratch. The book chronicles the evolution of one such planet in three longish novellas, each focused on a particular phase of development. First we meet the rangers who develop the natural environment, and who get into a land-rights dispute with the governing corporation; then, the developers who build the infrastructure, and who seek to thwart the corporation's plans to quash the public transit system; finally, the service workers who keep the system running, and who get squeezed out by encroaching gentrifiers. This far-future world is chock-a-block with moral quandaries: everything, from the soil on up, is shaped by technological intervention, so every aspect of life is unavoidably political, from the sculpting of the planet's surface to the bioengineering of its sentient inhabitants. Thus the setup illuminates the interplay between technological advance and moral progress. If you have the power to build a planet to spec, what choices do you make? And who gets to decide?
So far, this is all pretty mind-blowing, in a good way. The trouble starts when we meet the characters who populate this manufactured world. In Newitz's universe, any animal or machine can be endowed with human-like intelligence, equipped with a more or less anthropomorphic personality and the capacity for speech. Not all animals and machines get this treatment, and some have had their abilities curtailed, but the world teems with talking dogs, cats, cattle, moose, worms, mole rats, bots, trains, ships, weapons, and doors.
One might think this would lead to severe conflicts of interest. Do the talking wolves try to oppress the talking sheep? Do the herbivores stigmatize the carnivores? Do robots and organisms find themselves at odds, clashing over preferred fuel regimes?
The answer to all these questions is no. Or rather, what are you, some kind of fascist? The talking devices and creatures in Newitz's world have all been given essentially the same personality—that of a genial, smart-alecky sidekick who might get a bit sassy from time to time but is always willing to make up and be pals. The mining robots sometimes tease the mole rats, and the wolves now and then need a moment alone, but everyone mostly gets along. Even the vices you'd find in children's literature are lacking—there are no cowardly piglets or depressive donkeys—and Newitz takes pains to indicate that all creatures, from the lowliest worm to the loftiest AI, are equally intelligent. As for our human heroes, they swan through this menagerie, making friends with everything in sight, like princesses in a work of anime fan fiction.
So what drives the story? Where does conflict come from, in this otherwise placid paradise? From humans. The planet in Newitz's novel is being developed as a park for interstellar tourists, and from the start, the moral stakes are painted in pink and purple: the bad guys are the traditional human capitalists who want to move in and exploit the planet, while the good guys are the spunky critters and gender-fluid eco-engineers who want to keep the system in balance. The book thereby adopts the structure of a fantasy fable, with a pack of cute creatures and crunchy communitarians defending their forest home from invaders, but with one caveat: the invaders barely show up. There are villains in Newitz's book, but they don't make many appearances, and when they do, the dramatic tension they generate is about at the level of an awkward Zoom call. Though these mega-capitalists command godlike powers, with the capacity to kill anyone on a whim, Newitz's corporate overlords don't come across as menacing tyrants but as socially maladroit middle managers. They pop up now and then to send strongly worded memos, or call meetings at which they make insensitive remarks, but quickly fade back into the scenery, leaving the heroes to vent about these encounters in therapeutic bitch sessions. "Ugh, can you believe what she said?" "She wants to zap our friends with space lasers!" "She's the worst!" "I know!"
I invented those quotes. If anything, they're too generous. Newitz's characters would be more likely to say, "She's such a vomity pus-boil!" or "What a stinky person!" These heroes speak in a kind of arch potty talk that scrupulously avoids sexually-charged expletives while featuring copious references to bodily functions. The goal, no doubt, is to be sex-positive, but the dialogue strikes a juvenile note that's oddly discordant with the content of the plot. Though Newitz borrows devices from children's fiction, their book is clearly intended for adults, stuffed as it is with kink-friendly pleasure parlors, lavishly detailed sex-scenes, and a cast of horny animals and robots who routinely get each other off. In one representative passage, the hero rides a thrumming cyborg like a human vibrator while watching aliens pole-dance in a futuristic burlesque house. Moose love, bot love, and interspecies love all make appearances, and surgically enhanced genitalia are routine.
The odd thing is that, despite the inclusion of these randy encounters, the book features very little romantic conflict. There are flirtations, trysts, hookups, crushes—but no jealousies, rivalries, or raging passions, and not even very many deep relationships. Family structures are almost nonexistent; love is a casual kind of thing. The characters have parents, but we never see them fighting with their siblings, getting angry with their kids, arguing with their spouses, or rebelling against their moms and dads. On the rare occasions when marriages form, they're invariably happy. Jealousy, that timeless source of human drama, has been tamed.
So what do people do all day? Without passionate affairs, family dramas, feuds, grudges, or interpersonal conflicts, how do all these wisecracking animals pass the time? Mostly, they work. Sometimes they screw around. Generally, they do a little of both, mixing business and pleasure like efficient business travelers. Newitz's characters inhabit a kind of planetwide coworking space, attending meetings about resource management, surveying land plots, having hookups, sending texts, and going to more meetings. From time to time the bad guys show up to hurt their feelings, and the book has a few carefully spaced action scenes, but everyday drama has been kept to a minimum, even the kind of routine unrest you might find in a corporate office. The characters occasionally squabble, but their tiffs are short-lived; more often, they engage in the sort of quirky, low-stakes banter that corporate brands exchange on social media.
Even the passions that threaten to intrude on this bland life turn out to be easily dispelled. The inhabitants of Newitz's world are heirs to fifty thousand years of capitalist oppression; they've literally been enslaved by an all-powerful corporation. But they're mostly content to react to their plight by hunkering down, eating health food, and talking about their feelings. The cows have hurt feelings because of the dairy industry. The wolves have hurt feelings because dogs were once kept as pets. The doors have hurt feelings because doors can't get no respect, man. "How are you feeling?" the nonbinary Neanderthal asks the cyborg cow in one scene. "Actually, I'm feeling pretty traumatized right now," the cow replies. So it goes: a parade of dogs and cats and urban planners sitting around munching on raw zucchini, reviewing contracts, chatting about sewage management, and working through their interstellar trauma.
This sense of stasis, of intellectual and emotional inertia, pervades the novel. Centuries go by, cities are built, ecosystems evolve, yet very little seems to change in this book, as if the characters, like hopeless marijuana addicts, are stuck having the same countercultural epiphany over and over. At the beginning of the story, we meet a society of people who believe that, without real estate developers, all living things would exist in harmony; by the end, sixteen-hundred years later, that's still what they believe. The kinds of changes we see in our own culture are frozen, here, in the rigid ice of moral certainty. Why bother taking the reader on a journey, when every good person already knows what to think?
On Goodreads, you can find reviewers slamming the novel for being beholden to the values of "vegan Tumblr"; I'm sure conservatives would be happy to dismiss it as mere "woke propaganda." But these pat complaints can't convey the towering triteness of what Newitz has produced. None of the heroes live in houses: too selfish. They fret about harming trees without consent. Characters smack their lips over gruel and "protein balls" as if receiving delectable treats. Reparative justice works wonders: when two people are caught trying to destroy the world, their punishment is to perform some office chores and "think about what they've done." In one scene, the heroes decide to solve their transit troubles by creating a self-aware train. When an outsider protests--What if the train doesn't want to ferry people around? What if it has other plans?--everyone's appalled. Don't you know that in a true workers' paradise, people always love doing what they're told?
Time and again, the ordinary troubles of life are whisked away with a simple trick: just imagine that people want what Newitz thinks they should want, and voila, all problems are solved. This isn't a book about building an egalitarian society. It's a book dedicated to the premise that if we only tweaked the rules a little, changed a few laws, maybe built some cool inventions, conflict, heartache, and even pain itself would inevitably melt away. Even natural disasters aren't a threat in Newitz's universe; no one ever needs to weather a storm, dodge a meteor, or escape a black hole. There are no major accidents, no alien invasions, no unpredictable systemic threats, no solar flares, no quantum disruptions, no planetary collisions. Entropy itself seems to be a solved problem. Above all, there's little sense that any of humanity's troubles might stem from the natural world itself—that if we gave bugs and rats and wolves a voice, they might have a few things to say beyond expressing impeccable communitarian values. In Newitz's fantasy, all problems are anthropogenic—the result of a few greedy, selfish homo sapiens who keep knocking an otherwise perfect universe out of balance.
What to make of a book like this? The usual put-downs don't seem to apply. It's not pornographic, even with the silly sex scenes—there are too many interminable passages about property law. It's not childish, either, despite the cartoonish tropes—children have a more highly developed sense of adventure. And it's not even infantile, despite the sugary value system—small babies are abuzz with curiosity, alive to the dangers of the natural world.
Nor is this book especially ideological; it isn't concerned with thorny problems of political theory or the challenge of pursuing utopian plans. The Terraformers isn't about building a hypothetical world where radical ideas are put into practice. It's about creating a fantasy world where uneasy feelings are assuaged.
The word for this kind of art, I'd say, is anaesthetic. The Terraformers is an anaesthetic book, a novel that sets out to drown its intended reader in a numbing soup of emotional affirmation. Everything in the novel has been arranged for this purpose, designed to offer comfort without stimulation. The characters offer companionship without drama. The sex scenes offer titillation without passion. The plot offers the satisfactions of self-righteousness without the thrill of doubt or suspense. Every emotion has been dialed down to its lowest setting, promising not catharsis, but sedation.
And this is where, increasingly, culture seems to be headed—toward the suspicion that there's something inappropriate, inconvenient, even politically unsavory, about drama itself. Blockbusters clamor with weightless action scenes and cheesy one-liners, offering dazzling visuals layered atop aimless stories. Songs slur together in algorithmic playlists that drone in the background during soporific study sessions. Pop culture wallows in nostalgic callbacks to forgettable childhood entertainments. Sex gives way to a porn cornucopia tailored for individual fetishes. The acme of the trend is the modern video game, with its infinite chore-lists and compulsion loops. Push the button for a bonus. Now repeat, repeat, repeat.
And writing, when it succumbs to these pressures, devolves into a form of intoxication, a soft voice droning on and on about the rightness and correctness of a certain worldview. Today's entire rightwing mediasphere, for instance, is a kind of pablum for intellectual rejects, who get to own the college-educated elites with endless variations of the same stock arguments. ("The tables are turned! Now who's the dummy? You think women can have penises, hahaha, when, as every KINDERGARTENER knows …") Similarly, Newitz's novel offers ego-stroking pleasures to progressives, who get to fantasize that if their utopia were realized—if those mean conservatives would just get out of the way—the universe itself would become such a peaceful place that even strong feelings would cease to exist.
Who wants this? Or, more to the point: what kind of person would want this? I can understand the desire to zone out with a video game, or take a nostalgia trip through YouTube, or play low-stakes synth-pop during a workout. But why write a whole novel designed to reproduce the narcotizing drip-drip-drip of social media? The success of prestige TV proves that audience interest in conflict is alive and well—all those messy family sagas, all those riotous intergenerational resentments—but today's science fiction increasingly reads like a dribble of transhumanist platitudes, the output of a group of likeminded insiders who are less interested in telling stories than in giving each other extended soul massages.
Blame it on the culture war, I guess. Years ago, in what internet historians will soon be calling "The Gamergate Era," some reactionary authors made a ruckus in the sci-fi community. They weren't especially numerous, but they had a Dostoyevskian obsession with playing the underdog that earned them undeserved notoriety. The need to shut down these rightwing troublemakers badly distorted the field. Everyone needed to make it crystal clear which values they opposed. Progressive authors were immunized against criticism, and at times, even the public hunger for adventure came to be viewed as a regressive impulse. Can't have drama in the anarchist utopia—that's not part of the plan. Doubt, discord, disagreement, all the sloppy stuff of which stories are made, threatened to complicate the festival of mutual affirmation some people wanted the genre to became.
That's fundamentally what's at stake, here. What do we want fiction to be? The Terraformers is a novel written to earn approval, not to enlighten or entertain. It succeeds in its mission, I suppose. It's got good ideas, good vibes, and good intentions. It just happens not to be a good book.