[.ca] Terraforming Earth (ISBN 0765344971)

Something lost in the cloning process:
Williamson's characters seem incapable of judgment, generation after generation. I found their lack of common sense utterly frustrating. Led by the author's drive to embroil them in poetic and melancholy disaster, they are never allowed to exercise a maturity beyond the level of impetuous children. Despite his agile prose, imaginative flair, and high concept, his book fails utterly at the one crucial place where a story should connect with its reader - at the human level: Do we relate to these people, are they like us? In their place, what would we do? What does each say about us all? Over the thousands of years and multiple iterations of the same characters, stupidity seems to be a mathematical constant: every spaceflight turns to disaster for want of fuel, every safari ends in what appears a wasteful and pathetic death, every first contact in enslavement, and always due to a lack of preparation an planning easily evident to a reasonable person. Essentially, his puppet characters simplify his narrative task by remaining incapable of using their reason, holding their tongues, and exercising a free will that would exercise caution when faced with risk. This allows Mr. Williamson to follow his muse: Their foolishness propels the narrative and opens vistas, but rings false. Has wisdom, thought and will been bred out of these carousel horses, or does Mr. Williamson simply not care about them?

Interesting Plot:
Terraforming Earth is a first person perspective story about what happens in the long run after a major collision with Earth. The original plot is very interesting and it keeps you turning the pages to see what will happen. The main characters each have their own personalities and every time they are reborn they follow their same path with a few different variations each time. The new characters who are added into the story later in the book help keep the story from getting boring. Jack Williamson still has creative ideas even as he is getting older. He changes the direction of the story it seems in the middle and a few times later so that it doesn't get too repetitive. You start to really like a few of the characters and hate a few of the others. I rarely like any books that are first person perspective but this book protrayed the story as if the narrator was indifferent to what was happening. He just told it like it was instead of bogging the story down with his thoughts and emotions. It did not get a five star because some of the story seemed very pointless and the ending was kind of weird. But the story keeps you anxious to see what will happen from their actions when they are born again. Bottom line- Good plot but a little repetitive although the repetition is what makes it interesting. Four stars.

Entertaining but nothing new:
This is a fairly entertaining book. However the plot is very similar to the plot in Stephen Baxter's "Space". The basis for the plot is, however, so much more solid in Baxter's book. The ending of the book is very abrupt. It seems like Williamson runs out of ideas, and hurrily tries to gather his stuff and leave.

A Grand Master Shows He Still Has What It Takes:
In 1942, Jack Williamson coined the term "terraforming" to describe the process of altering another planet to make it more Earth-like and thus habitable for humans. Now, in his 73rd year of being a published writer, Williamson turns the table. An eccentric millionaire, Calvin DeFort, builds a robot-run base on the Moon stocked with tissue samples from hundreds of critical animal and plant species, plus from a small but select group of people. His goal is to create a safety net for Earth, to preserve Earth's ecology in case of a catastrophic event. He doesn't get it quite done before Earth is struck by a huge asteroid and the surface is scoured clean of life. The story then tracks the lives of the clones created from the tissue samples of the original occupants of the Moon base. Whenever the robots and the master computer believe that the Earth is ready for an attempt at re-habitation, clones are made, raised, and trained to re-terraform Earth. Several failures occur due to unforeseeable events (an alien invasion, subsequent asteroid strikes, world wars), but the clones keep coming back to try again. The group is always drawn from the same, small cache of human tissue samples, and the genetic similarities are clear, but each group also develops its own set of somewhat distinct personalities (the cast of the story is small, but also large). Williamson shows us again why he was one of the early Grand Masters of science fiction. The writing flows rapidly and coherently, the characters ring true and real, and the story is engrossing. There is also a wistfulness, bordering on the melancholy, to this story. It is clear from the tone of the book that it was written by a man looking back at his long life and wondering about the (and his) future. It is almost poetic and dream-like at times. I don't know if Mr. Williamson plans another novel, but this would be hard to top, and is also very fitting as a Grand Finale for a Grand Master. Of course, if someone COULD top "Terraforming Earth", who better than Jack Williamson?

A Disappointment from a Grand Master:
This book is really four novelettes retrofitted around "The Ultimate Earth," a novelette which (inexplicably) won all sorts of awards. Like a lot of "novels" that are jury-rigged around extended short stories, this one has all the weaknesses and few of the strengths that other such novels have. (The best novel of this kind is Fred Pohl's Years of the City, a clear masterpiece.) I found the only good section of this book to be the first. It sets up a remarkable premise and sets about unfolding it rather well. But by the time the book ends, you really don't know who is who and the far future earth seems more like modern-day Africa. Not a single imaginative trope in sight. This would be an excellent first book, however. Unfortunately, it isn't. The five star ratings this book has received clearly are given to the man and not the work. This isn't a good place to start with one's reading of Jack Williamson.