

That fits, because in some ways, “The Terraformers” is more like a classic western than the bleak nightmare future portrayed in many science-fiction novels and films. 23 to discuss his debut, “The Violin Conspiracy.” “I’m all in on Jimmy Stewart,” the author says.īooks How a real-life stolen violin inspired Brendan Slocumb’s bestselling mysteryīestselling author Brendan Slocumb joins the L.A.
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And though “The Terraformers” is set on another planet in a distant future, Newitz still used the familiar technique of mining and repurposing bits and pieces of old memories.ĭestry, the novel’s tough but empathetic environmental ranger, gets her name from the lead character in the movie “Destry Rides Again.” In the 1939 Hollywood western, Jimmy Stewart plays the son of a legendary gunfighter who dislikes firearms and tries to avoid carrying one, even though he’s a skilled marksman. Populating that epic with compelling characters was the next part of the evolution.

“I think it’s part of the pleasure for readers, too, because the more consistent the world is, the more you can immerse yourself in it, and escape from the dreadfully inconsistent world that we live in.” One of the keys to writing science fiction, Newitz says, is trying to create an internally consistent imaginary world.

In writing the novel, Newitz compiled a massive document - essentially a mini-encyclopedia for the planet Sask-E - to keep the details straight. “I read a lot of those as a kid, and I always enjoyed that feeling of like, ‘Oh, now we get to see what happens much later.’ I wanted to experiment with that format.” That notion appealed to Newitz, who also saw the chance to write a multigenerational epic. You know, what happens long after the revolution.’” “I was agonizing about what I was going to write next, and she’s like, ‘You need to write a story about nation building. Newitz got the idea for “The Terraformers” from a friend, poet Stephanie Burt. Science journalist and sci-fi writer Annalee Newitz’s new novel, “The Terraformers,” brims with fascinating premises and the same old human conundrums. That is definitely going in the book.’”īooks In a new ‘galaxy brain’ novel, it’s AD 59,000 - and we’re still kind of a mess “And I was like, ‘Of course, it makes sense that that exists. “He’s like, ‘Have you heard of lava dams, where volcanic rocks and lava creates a dam and reroutes the river?’” Newitz recalls. Newitz asked House for suggestions on how characters would dam a river. I don’t know how they form,’” Newitz says. I thought, ‘I have literally no idea how rivers work. So it was interesting to think about it from that angle.”Īdditionally, “I have this gigantic river in the novel. “I mean, the point is that earthquakes kind of suck for everybody, and of course you can get tsunamis even on the East Coast. “When you pick a planet, do you try to make all the nice things from Earth be there?”īut what parts of Earth would you leave out? One thing that came up when Newitz talked to planetary scientists and geologists was plate tectonics, the movement of large portions of the Earth’s surface that builds mountains but also causes earthquakes and tsunamis. “In ‘The Terraformers,’ before I started writing, I wanted to understand what kind of a planet you would choose to do a terraforming project on, given that you’re in the future and you could just search around for planets. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, I really need to interview some roboticists now, because I have no idea what I’m doing, and I have a character who is a robot,’” they recall.
