Tor, 2001, 347pp, $24.95 ISBN 0-312-87200-3
"Terraformng Earth" sounds oxymoronic. I assumed that it might have overtones like Gandhi on western civilisation (who thought that it would be a good idea), but in fact this novel is something different. The jacket blurb - "after a catastrophic impact by a huge meteor ... successive generations undertake the enormous challenge of restoring life to a barren planet" - is inaccurate. The significant thing about this story is that there is no succession. From a moon base hastily occupied at the time of the disaster, robots grow cloned children to return to Earth when the conditions seem possible. Over and over, new clones tell their stories of the return and their discoveries (the robots are not close enough to see what is happening in detail). And over and over, sometimes after only a half page - there is silence as a new disaster kills the clones. Of course, in the centuries between the robots' decisions geology and evolution take their manifold paths and each time the humans return they find something new.
With only five humans to clone from, and Williamson's implicit belief that germ plasm is destiny, his characters may find different Earths on their return but their actions become more and more ritualised, as if it were not new individuals returning, but five souls being reborn without learning anything. So, about half way through the novel the different geologies and ecologies to which the humans return cease to matter, and instead, what were once separated lovers and failed relationships struggle to re-unite. Meanwhile, some life evolves into intelligence, as aliens from distant space take advantage of the robots' long periods of inactivity between generating new human explorers and plant themselves on the re-growing Earth.
With so much repetition we could be in the world of Nietzsche and his philosophies. I would have thought that the robots should have a copy of Olaf Stapledon's LAST AND FIRST MEN in their moon library, as it uses this idea on a universal scale, but they don't. So to end on a point of comparison - anyone who likes TERRAFORMING EARTH should also read LAST AND FIRST MEN, to see how Williamson's view of human evolution diverges from something more visionary.