Terraforming Earth

Jack Williamson, the dean of American science fiction writers, has written some of the most imaginative and exciting speculative fiction published during the nine decades of his extraordinary career. With Terraforming Earth, this Grand Master of the field tackles nothing less than the fate of the earth after a catastrophic impact by a huge meteor.

Unlike the scores of novels, films, and television miniseries that dwell on how humanity might deal with such an event, this novel takes us past the terrible collision and far into the future, with a group of people who escape the debacle to establish a safe harbor on Earth's Moon.

From Tycho Base they can monitor conditions on the devastated earth. Years pass, then centuries, and then millenia, as they, their cloned children, and their children's children through successive generations undertake the enormous challenge of restoring life to a barren planet.

In what may be the capstone of his remarkable career, Jack Williamson has created a compelling human drama, spinning a fascinating tale of danger, change, and survival in a richly imagined future.

"Sweeping, imaginative, and captivating; As good as, perhaps better than anything Williamson has written in his long and astonishing career." Kirkus Reviews

Williamson's skill at speculative fiction is once again evident in this far-future saga of mankind's destiny...Throughout, poetic undercurrents permeate this masterful work by a superb chronicler of the cosmic." Publishers Weekly

"Fans of hard science and old-fashioned sf adventure should enjoy this vividly imagined tale of life at the far end of time." Library Journal

"This is indeed the work of a grand master of sf." Booklist

When a giant meteor crashes into the earth and destroys all life, the small group of human survivors manage to leave the barren planet and establish a new home on the moon. From Tycho Base, men and woman are able to observe the devastated planet and wait for a time when return will become possible.

Generations pass. Cloned children have had children of their own, and their eyes are raised toward the giant planet in the sky which long ago was the cradle of humanity. Finally, after millennia of waiting, the descendants of the original refugees travel back to a planet they've never known, to try and rebuild a civilization of which they've never been a part.

The fate of the earth lies in the success of their return, but after so much time, the question is not whether they can rebuild an old destroyed home, but whether they can learn to inhabit an alien new world — Earth.

In 1942, Jack Williamson coined the term "terraforming" in his novel Seetee Ship, to refer to what people from Earth did to modify an alien world to make it suitable for humans. So, terraforming Earth sounds strange...unless Earth is no longer habitable by humans. Long before the start of this exciting novel, all life on Earth has been decimated by the impact of a gigantic asteroid. But before the devastating collision, a small group of survivors escape to the moon, where genetic clones of themselves then slumber for millennia. When alien starfarers arrive, together they must undo the damage and rebuild the Earth's ecosphere so that humans and aliens alike can live on the planet.