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I read this as a part of the #SFFBookClub for March. I voted for this book largely because I had enjoyed Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown and wanted to read more from her.

To sum up the book, it's a wuxia novella that follows a bandit group along with ex-nun Guet Imm. Guet Imm in the first scene loses her job at a coffee shop because of said bandits and insists on joining said gang.  Very queer; some gender stuff going on; the gang itself is sort of a found family that sticks up for each other even when they don't get along.  It's hard to talk about too much more without getting into spoilers. It's far more about characterization and shifting identities due to wartime loss than about magical fight scenes.

I was not expecting to find this book so funny and to have such great banter.  Guet Imm is an optimistic force of nature whose personality carries the book.  Her dynamic with the grumpy Tet Sang and amused Fung Cheung made the book a lot of fun.  She shows up to the group of bandits and insists that she's joining them despite being already paid off, despite not being able to cook, and also despite making it very clear that she will not sleep with any of them.  This sort of dynamic continues elsewhere where Guet Imm innocently and irreverently inserts herself into situations (fully knowing what she's doing) while everybody else is amused or exasperated.  (Although they are definitely not the same character, I think there are some personality vibe parallels with Prunella from Sorcerer to the Crown here, which probably added to my enjoyment.)

If I had any complaint, I feel like the focus on banter and main characters left some of the other place and character details out of focus.  One amusing example is the scene where Guet Imm shows up to join the group and multiple bandits are introduced out of thin air.  There's an ongoing conversation, and Ah Boon (never mentioned before) tries to flirt with Guet Imm.  A few conversation beats later, Fung Cheung says "oh you can ask Rimau about religion" and Rimau (never mentioned before) chimes in.  Then, Fung Cheung mentions Ah Yee's cooking and Ah Yee (also never mentioned before) chimes in a reply.  Maybe this is supposed to be an intentionally comedic clown car introduction of the bandit troupe (or some trope that went over my head), but it took a reread to make sure I understood who all was even in the scene.

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot.  Would recommend.

Overall this book wasn't for me. I found it heavy-handed and repetitive. Would not recommend.

Plot-wise, this is an extremely long fantasy quest novel about insecure heir Ryan, knowledge-seeking-at-all-costs scholar cousin Lyelee, and nearly indestructible magical "weapon"/actually a person Nonee going to find some fuel in a dangerous mage-torn land to keep a magical fire burning for ostensibly motivational reasons.

The book sets up a tale of Ryan following in the footsteps of the previous heir Garrett's journey to find fuel and intersperses the two journeys. Unfortunately, I don't feel like these scenes served the book very well. They didn't reveal much hidden backstory, didn't really develop Arianna and Nonee's relationship (which felt fixed from the moment they met), didn't reveal much about Garrett himself, and only served to draw out the journey by doubling its length.

The characters felt very flat to me. Sure, Ryan and Lyelee have a little bit of (what you might expect) character arcs, but I felt like 90% of the book was emphasizing their initial characterization and the last 10% had the interesting arc. The rest of the characters were fairly one-note to my ears. In several occasions where members of the party died, others offered condolences and would say something akin to "oh yes they were a good lay" and I was like EXCUSE ME there was not a whiff of this on the page.

I think overall this book's biggest strength is interesting worldbuilding: mage roads that take the same length to walk, politics, scholars wanting knowledge but differentiating themselves from mages, Captain Marstan and Tanika's relationship, what's going on with the fuel and the fire, the rock with a face that follows the party, the world itself being somewhat sentient, angry dirt, etc etc etc. However, these interesting details are dragged under by a long series of encounters (mostly solved by Nonee in both past and present).

This is a novel about a corporate-run terraformed world and the struggle of the people building that world to push back on their awful corporate owners and ultimately become self-governing.

Chapter one of this book really gripped me: a park ranger on a terraforming planet (who can connect to sensors in nearby trees and grasses) and her texting/flying moose buddy stop a rich camping tourist hurting the local ecosystem. Here's a small handful of other delightful worldbuilding details that I enjoyed, just for flavor: new people are built/decanted rather than born; sentient worms solve NP completeness; there's an endearing cat/train relationship. I think there's something fun about a novel that sets itself extremely far in the future and stuffs itself with neat ideas.

It's hard not to feel the echoes of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy in this whole book. Aside from the obvious bit that it's about the terraforming of a planet, it's also (a more direct) struggle against capitalist ownership. It's also structured into three section, each of which are many years apart and some long-lived characters who exist across all three parts. Each both have their own underground organization (spoilery pun :drum:) consisting of similar (spoilers elided) people. The afterword mentions that KSR asked for a character named Kim if Newitz wrote a book about terraforming.

The "big bad" here is capitalism (when is it not) and its desire to control and use people as things for profit. If there's one thematic "big good", it's probably cooperatism, and giving folks who are involved in the work a voice. At times, this came off as didactic and the side of "good" felt far too unambiguous and unmessy. The way the book hews closely to so many current-day issues (gentrification, homelessness, water rights, mass transit) felt almost a little too on the nose. However, I think it all ~mostly worked for me in the end, because a novel trying to be so hopeful about the future is the kind of refreshing book I want more of in my life.

One thing I had hoped early on to see more about was some discussion about terraforming itself being somewhat a suspect activity (especially in this larger context of capitalism / colonialism / etc). There's certainly PLENTY of shade thrown at the capitalist forces at work here, but the book brushes past most discussion of terraforming itself by having it occur on a planet that is entirely a lifeless orb.

Mostly, I think it's interesting for me to think about comparing this book's ERT rangers vs evil corporation perspectives against the third perspective from To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers. That book has the most humble approach to (attempted) zero-impact space exploration that I've ever seen. Characters change themselves and their bodies to fit into the new environment. Whereas The Terraformers is about changing the environment to suit (current for us) human bodies as a marketing gimmick, even when there's a furry VR gym's worth of body types and body swapping.

Even on rereading, this book is a really satisfying conclusion to the duology. I feel like the strongest theme of these books is really the question of "what is a legacy" (art? children? conquest? etc).

Even though the larger historical picture of this duology is the arc of one particular emperor and empress, it manages to give plenty of side characters enough time on page to each have their own arc, intersect with each other, and get their own development and resolution in a satisfying way.

One thing that I liked in this series (that I also think Tigana is a great example of as well) is that this book's plot is a small number of very dense events. For example, there's a wedding at some point, but there's multiple points of views leading up to it for why people are there, how they ended up there at all, how they're feeling during it, politics, posturing, a confrontation both during and then after it with lots of repercussions. I think it works really well as a narrative technique.

I read this a long while ago, but I really liked Jo Walton's review of these books if you want even more thoughts on this series: www.tor.com/2009/11/02/mosaics-and-charioteers-guy-gavriel-kays-sarantine-mosaic/