IN A deep future tens of thousands of years from now, animals have been brought into the so-called Great Bargain: in saving Earth from the consequences of the Anthropocene, a deal has been struck between all creatures, and humans now include everyone in managing the shared land.
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But to participate, you need to be a person, and for that you must pass an intelligence assessment. So while relations between species look much more egalitarian than they did – with wisecracking robots working closely alongside talking animals and humans – Homo sapiens still calls the shots. In fact, the closer you look in The Terraformers, the ambitious new novel from New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz, the more familiar things become.
Destry is an environmental ranger on patrol across a planet under construction, a world being terraformed over a time span of millennia by a galactic real estate corporation. Her partner, a moose named Whistle, missed the boat on the intelligence assessment, and is classed not as a person, but as a Mount. Destry considers him an equal and a close friend, but technically she owns him. He has been fitted with a neurolinguistic limiter, in keeping with his status, to stop him speaking freely.
The pair encounter a species that shouldn’t be there, living under extreme conditions to hide from the corporation, the motives of which grow more sinister with every page. The rangers then need to rethink the systems they have been living with up to now: what is the ceiling on equality when everything is done according to one group’s rules?
Science fiction is uniquely placed to examine a big moral question of our time: what do we owe the non-humans in our care? In the Anthropocene, we control the fates of many animals because we control their habitats, and some societies are starting to think it isn’t OK to treat these animals inhumanely. So how do we enshrine this goal? Should animals be granted personhood?
This has long been suggested by moral philosophers like Peter Singer, who argues animals should be persons if they can experience self-awareness over time. But what then? Will that be enough, given how we treat other persons? Who grants personhood? And what relationship will it codify when rights seem to be contingent on human-like intelligence?
Granting such rights has been the assumption in sci-fi, from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau to David Brin’s Uplift trilogy. Brin’s books, in particular, assume that it is an unalloyed good to “uplift” other animals to intellectual parity with humans, that we will subsequently treat them as equals and that the animals will be happy to take part.
But Newitz sees that humans like to rig the game, that animals might come with their own grievances and questions, and that it will be hard to escape the inertia of hierarchies keeping us locked in status games.
Terraformers is packed with detail and filled with descriptions of meetings and meal prep – like a manual for running a commune. But that may be exactly what it is meant to be: a commune to uplift all creatures from the tyranny of human evaluation.
If Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy was a blueprint for how to terraform a planet, Newitz has described how one might build systems from the ground up that apportion value fairly, with air we can all breathe.
Sally Adee is a technology and science writer based in London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee
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