Newitz ambitiously shows how far in the future, if we survive the many crises ahead, we might still be able to build not just worlds like Earth, but communities of engineered species and intelligences, and overcome odds set by corporations and social contracts stacked against liberty. That's a tall ambition, and she mostly nails it. ( )

The time jumps initially caught me off guard, but they are integral to the telling of this sweeping narrative and are in line with the great classics of science fiction. The concepts are of the kind that feel just out of reach of our current ability to create, but not understand. Most of all I was warned by the characters’ drive to do good for and be considerate of each other and their world. Lessons woven inside a gripping tale are the best kind. ( )

There are a whole lot of ideas in this book -- about what it takes to protect an ecosystem, about who gets to be a person, about the assumptions we tend to make about language and intelligence, about how to structure a society, about collective decision-making, about what is and isn't considered a reasonable plan of action. I really liked the worldbuilding, with the various people (only some of whom were human or even biological), the ERT, the sensor networks... and the subversion of modern assumptions about biological gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Also the stuff about language and intelligence, and what kind of society would limit people's communication ability just to lock them into a particular kind of work.

Unfortunately I found the giant time jumps pretty jarring. Just when I'd get really invested in a set of characters, we're hundreds of years in the future and most of them aren't around anymore. I do like that we got to see the long-term consequences of some of the decisions that were made. But I feel like we broke away from Destry's story, or Misha's, while there was still a lot left to tell. Also, the ending felt a bit rushed -- as soon as some old corporate secrets came out, things were basically solved, and also this magically caused a different corporation to generously reverse gentrification?

That said, there's still a lot I liked here. The sentient flying trains! The Tongue Forks! The way Chef subverted her language limiter by moving to Tooth! Everything about Spider City! ( )

I really wanted to like this book but it just didn't work for me. The author has obviously done some research into biodiversity, ecology and geology, but just doesn't seem to have thought the science through properly and instead flung it all into a big, unconvincing stew. Plus, the economics of a megacorp running a multi-thousand year project to terraform a planet for profit 60,000 years later doesn't ring true.
The first section is OK, with some world-building and a bit of decent charaterisation, but the remaining 2/3 are a flurry of random names, actions and events that lack coherence or interest. ( )

DNF ( )