“A History of Terraforming”

Most of the stories in Asimov’s July 2010’s issue left me cold - when I did finish them - or uninclined to go beyond a couple of pages. Then I came to the last tale, novella “A History of Terraforming”. At the very least I expected I’d like it because it’s by Robert Reed. By the end, I wasn’t sure how I felt, but I eventually decided that, yes, I liked it, quite a bit even though much of it could be considered a downer. It shows attempts after attempts to terraform our solar system to provide room for our ever-increasing population, starting on Mars when the narrator is a child and through the next millennia. Life eventually does gain a precarious foothold in harsh environments, but at the price of humanity changing itself. Still it is life and, while life is know to exist outside of our solar system, there are few signs that it’s more complex than microbes. And yet there is hope.

”…Today, those civilizations nearest to humanity are just beginning to hear the Earth’s original transmissions, radio and radar whispers barely hinting at everything that has happened since, and it is presumed that in another several thousand years, a slow rich conversation will commence. Orour neighbors will respond to our presence with the most perfect, telling silence. The fertile imagination easily conceives wonders as well as horrors coming from this unborn history. But this man before you, this atum, believes that the real gift of the Others will be to suggest to us the richest, most stable answers to the eternal questions of life and living well in a universe that holds minds such as ours in such very low esteem.”