2025/006: The Terraformers — Annalee Newitz

2025/006: The Terraformers — Annalee Newitz

...researchers found the H. sapiens germline in a seventy-thousand-year-old biobank that had been moldering in the museum basement. Nobody is really sure what the biobank was for, but archaeologists think it probably had some kind of ritual use. Back then, people had all kinds of superstitions about their genomes. They would send their genetic material to this biobank, and analysts would tell their fortunes by grouping them into categories like ‘West African’ or ‘European’ or ‘Indigenous American.’ [loc. 5568]

Told in three parts, The Terraformers is set in the far future, on a planet known as Sask-E. The terraformers are employees (or perhaps slaves) of Verdance, an interstellar corporation whose goal is to recreate Pleistocene-era Earth ( Read more... )