Review by Booklist Review
Environmental Rescue Team ranger Destry and her mount, Whistle, are hard at work keeping the planet of Sask-E and its ecosystems in balance. When they discover a secret community of people who should be long dead hidden under a volcano, they're forced to confront tough questions about the capitalist corporate money controlling the planet. This complex, vivid book explores several generations of nation building as companies fight for control and the people on-planet work to create a utopia that recognizes all beings as proper people, fighting systemic issues with the Intelligence Assessment rating or redefining which creatures count as legal "people." It also features sentient and autonomous moose, cows, and even trains; consensual, kinky sex; and a deep, scientific dig into the possibilities of a society that truly embraces the environment. Newitz's latest is far-reaching and ambitious but also surprisingly cozy and warm, perfect for fans of recent Hugo Award--winner A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021), by Becky Chambers. Newitz has a true gift for exploring the tweaks, movements, and decisions that keep history moving forward centuries ahead, and for digging into weighty issues while maintaining light humor, a delightful queer sensibility, and pure moments of joy.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Newitz (The Future of Another Timeline) performs a staggering feat of revolutionary imagination in this hopeful space-opera built from three interconnected novellas. "Settlers" opens on Destry Thomas, a ranger with the Environmental Rescue Team on corporate-owned planet Sasky, as she stumbles on a fiercely independent underground society, Spider City. Discovery puts Spider City at risk, while showing Sasky's surface-dwellers a new possible future. In "Public Works," a crew of bots and hominins grows from uneasy colleagues to found family while trying to design a planetwide public transport network. They're undermined at every step by their corporate overlords, until they reach Spider City, where every being is a person, and a radical new solution presents itself. "Gentrifiers" sees a planetwide housing crisis bring together a sentient train, Scrubjay, and Moose, a cat journalist. As unrest erupts across Sasky's big cities, Scrubjay and Moose race to lend aid, in the process uncovering a shocking secret that could be key to breaking the corporate stranglehold over the planet. Newitz masterfully grapples with questions of embodiment and personhood, exploring the power of coalition and the impossibility of utopia under capitalism. With the ethos of Becky Chambers and the gonzo imagination of Samuel R. Delany, plus a strong scientific basis in ecology and urban planning, this feels like a new frontier in science fiction. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The Environmental Rescue Team is an eons-old organization tasked with monitoring and preserving ecosystems. ERT Ranger Destry Thomas is working to terraform Sask-E, a planet that is, along with every living thing on it, owned by Verdance, an intergalactic corporation. When Destry discovers a hidden city, she and her flying, talking moose Whistle, discover the truth of the planet's history. Forced to confront her mission, her loyalties, and secrets, Destry starts a sequence of events that will echo for generations. Seven centuries later, Destry's protégé Misha clashes with Sulfur, an engineer, as they work to create a planet transit system. Yet they come together (along with a team of robots, naked mole rats, and the irate cyborg cow Zest) when real-estate conglomerate Emerald reveals a plan to make Homo sapiens the highest life form. A millennium later, Sulfur and Misha's remarkable child faces a tipping point, which brings Sask-E back to a choice: acquiesce to control, or alter life on the planet forever. Newitz's (The Future of Another Timeline) prose makes accessible the novel's discussions of Indigenous genetics, terraforming, representation, and urban development. VERDICT An incredibly emotional and action-packed novel deftly taking on personhood, corporate ownership, and terraforming.--Kristi Chadwick
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