Terraforming in literature and popular culture
Terraforming is well represented in contemporary literature, usually in the form of science fiction, as well as in popular culture. While many stories involving interstellar travel feature planets already suited to habitation by humans and supporting their own indigenous life, some authors prefer to address the unlikeliness of such a concept by instead detailing the means by which humans have converted inhospitable worlds to ones capable of supporting life through artificial means.
Author Jack Williamson is credited with inventing and popularizing the term "terraform". In July 1942, under the pseudonym Will Stewart, Williamson published a science fiction novella entitled "Collision Orbit" in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. The series was later published as two novels, Seetee Shock and Seetee Ship. American geographer Richard Cathcart successfully lobbied for formal recognition of the verb "to terraform", and it was first included in the fourth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 1993.
Literature
| Date | Title | Author | Planet/Moon | Notes |
| 1898 | War of the Worlds | H. G. Wells | Earth | When the Martians invade the Earth, they bring with them some red weed.The weed starts to kill off Earth indigenous plant life and multiply rapidly |
| 1910 | «La Journée d'un Parisien au XXIe siècle» | Octave Béliard | Moon | The Moon is gradually given an atmosphere, and vegetation is acclimated in order to turn the Earth's satellite into a natural reserve or sanctuary for endangered species, but also to allow human colonization. |
| 1927 | The Last Judgment | J. B. S. Haldane | Venus | An essay that proposes how life on Earth might end and speculates on the evolution of humanity, space exploration and colonization, and adaptation to new environments. Venus is proposed as a new home. |
| 1930 | Last and First Men | Olaf Stapledon | Venus | Following up where Haldane left off, Stapledon's future history provides the first example in fiction in which Venus is modified, after a long and destructive war with the original inhabitants. Stapledon imagines a native Venus that is covered in oceans. |
| 1950 | Farmer in the Sky | Robert A. Heinlein | Ganymede | A family emigrates from Earth to the Jovian moon Ganymede, which is being terraformed. Farmer in the Sky is a historically significant novel in relation to terraforming in popular culture, as it was one of the first to take the subject more seriously than simple fantasy, portraying terraforming with scientific and mathematical considerations. |
| 1951 | The Sands of Mars | Arthur C. Clarke | Mars | First instance of Martian terraforming. Clarke's fictional methods for terraforming the planet include generating heat by igniting Phobos into a second sun, and growing plants that break down the Martian sands in order to release oxygen. |
| 1952 | The Martian Way | Isaac Asimov | Mars | Terraforming of Mars using ice from Saturn's rings. |
| 1954 | The Big Rain | Poul Anderson | Venus | Terraforming Venus. Anderson considers the great time scale inherent in planetary engineering and its effects upon society. Later, the title became associated with scientific terraforming models. |
| 1958 | The Snows of Ganymede | Poul Anderson | Ganymede | Terraforming of Ganymede |
| 1960 | Chirurgien d'une planète | Gérard Klein | Mars | Terraforming Mars. |
| 1961 | Second Ending | James White | Fomalhaut IV | Fomalhaut, the fourth planet was secretly terraformed by robots over millions of years |
| 1969 | Isle of the Dead | Roger Zelazny | Illyria | Francis Sandow is the last surviving human born in the 20th century who becomes a "worldscaper" - a terraformer with godlike powers. |
| 1984 | Greening of Mars | James Lovelock Michael Allaby | Mars | One of the most influential science fiction novels on the actual science of terraforming. The novel explores the formation and evolution of planets, the origin of life, and Earth's biosphere. Spacecraft are illustrated in a realistic manner, and terraforming models in the book foreshadowed future debates regarding the goals of terraforming. |
| 1986-1988 | Venus of Dreams Venus of Shadows | Pamela Sargent | Venus | Terraforming of Venus. |
| 1992 | Mining the Oort | Frederik Pohl | Mars | Terraforming by diverting comets from the Oort cloud to Mars |
| 1992-1999 | Mars Trilogy | Kim Stanley Robinson | Mars | Three novels provide a lengthy description of terraforming Mars spanning centuries. The novels represent contemporary scientific and philosophical developments in the field, and also pay homage to the already existing fictional literature related to Mars. |
| 2011 | Terra Formars | written by Yū Sasuga illustrated by Kenichi Tachibana | Mars | In an attempt to colonize Mars, 21st century scientists were tasked with warming up the planet so that humans could survive on its surface. |
| 2012 | 2312 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Much of the Solar System | A novel set one century after the future timeline of the Mars Trilogy, centred on a pair of characters born on Mercury and Titan. Many elements of the novel deal with living in space and the colonisation of moons and asteroids throughout the solar system, but one important subplot centres on the ongoing terraforming of Venus. |
Terraforming of fictional planets in literature
- H. G. Wells alludes to what today might be called xeno-terraforming - alien life altering Earth for their own benefit - in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. When the Martians arrive they bring with them a red weed that spreads and overpowers terrestrial vegetation.
- Terraforming is one of the basic concepts around which Frank Herbert's Dune novels are based: the Fremen's obsession with converting the desert-world Arrakis to earthlike conditions supplies the fugitive Paul Atreides with a ready-made army of followers. The Imperium's capital world Kaitain has all its weather controlled by satellites. Pardot Kynes, the Planetary Ecologist from Arrakis visited the world, and commented that the nature of the control meant it would eventually bring about disaster, which is why Arrakis should be terraformed through more natural processes.
- Roger MacBride Allen's novel The Depths of Time features a fictional planet, Solace, on which terraforming is failing and bringing about climatic and ecological collapse.
- Liz Williams' novel The Ghost Sister offers a critique of terraforming. The ruling elite of Irie St Syre, the Gaianism priestesses, believe that humanity has a right to adapt the climate and biosphere of planets to its own needs. They send out emissaries to a lost colony, Monde d'Isle, who have adapted humanity to their planet, not the other way around.
- Laura J. Mixon's novel Burning the Ice is set on an imagined frozen moon of 47 Ursae Majoris b which is being terraformed by induced global warming.
- Building Harlequin's Moon, by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, shows the creation of a substantial moon by smashing several smaller moons together, and the very lengthy process of terraforming it over 60,000 years.
- Chris Moriarty's novel Spin Control features a fictional planet, Novalis, on which terraforming is progressing in a speed and direction which defy scientific theory.
- In These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman, the protagonist, teenage Lilac LaRoux, lives a life of luxury due to her rich father who has financed the terraforming of several planets inside the fictional universe. The story focusses on Lilac and an army commander as they are the only survivors of a spaceship crash on a planet that appears to be in the process of terraforming but has been abandoned.
Television and film
Video Games
Deforming terrain, as used in such games as Perimeter and Red Faction, is occasionally known as terraforming but is not related to planetary engineering.As a game mechanic
As a plot element
| Date | Title | Genre | Notes |
| 1989 | Millennium 2.2 | Strategy | Colonization of the Solar System with the ultimate goal of returning Earth to habitability. |
| 1992 | Star Control II | Multiple | The fungoid Mycon terraform geologically active worlds to their liking, shattering the crust, giving direct access to the mantle. |
| 1995 | ' | Simulation? | The invention of the terraformer usually kills its species; it must be copied, prevented and reintroduced later to a more mature society. Success marks the end of guarding sentient species against an invader and begins the more tedious task of balancing them against each other. |
| 1995-2008 | The Command & Conquer Tiberian series | Real-time strategy | Earth ravaged by the alien substance Tiberium, a self-replicating mineral extractor crystal that works on a planetary scale. |
| 1997 | Outpost 2: Divided Destiny | Real-time strategy | A failed attempt at terraforming an alien planet precipitates the game's events as inhabitants flee "the Blight" and lava flows. |
| 1999-2008 | The X series | Space flight simulator game | Earth has built a race of terraformer ships which have started to build colonies on uninhabited planets throughout the X Universe. These robotic machines then turn on their owners due to a programming error and wage a war against them, destroying the Terran colonies and attacking Earth itself. They now exist as the Xenon. |
| 2000 | Armored Core 2 | Third-person shooter | Mars is undergoing the last stages terraformation during the events of the game. It has a breathable atmosphere, surface temperatures comparable to Earth's and a sizable ocean. |
| 2001 | Strategy/Third-person shooter | As we delve deeper in the plot, the genetically-engineered "alien" Species, after having turned against their masters, begin to drop the ambient temperatures of the island chicane where they operate. And in addition to pumping toxins into the air and increasing ground radiation levels, to bypass their in-built sensitivity to heat. The effects of terraforming become more and more pronounced with every mission, until the final islands come to resemble nothing on our planet Earth, as we know it. | |
| 2002-2008 | Escape Velocity Nova | Space trading and combat | Mars saw the first use of terraforming technology, becoming a ball of toxic algae sludge. Other planets have been terraformed and colonized using the now-corrected processes. An optional sidequest involves hauling terraforming equipment to a barren world that becomes more hospitable. |
| 2004 | Half-Life 2 | First-person shooter | Earth under terraformation by the Combine Empire for new inhabitants. Examples include the draining of the oceans and depletion of natural resources. A "Suppression Field" prevents humans from reproducing. |
| 2006 | ' | First-person shooter | The "Chimera" cool the Earth for their purposes, making it snow in London in July. |
| 2007 | Crysis | First-person shooter | An alien ship begins forming an ice sphere around the island it has landed on, affecting weather patterns and ultimately making the Earth more habitable for them. |
| 2008 | Fallout 3 | RPG/First-person shooter | A prototype module capable of terraforming large areas of land and creating life itself from inanimate matter, designed to be used following a nuclear war, is central to the game's storyline. |
| 2009 | RPG/FPS | Mars is in the process of being terraformed to allow colonists and miners to walk the surface of the planet without any advanced protection. Light vegetation can be seen in certain parts of the game. | |
| 2013 | Defiance | Shooter/MMO | The entire Earth was subjected to terraforming events, many of which were designed to replicate alien environments. Due to the nature in which these terraforming devices were activated, it created a mostly new world: altering the physical landscape of the world, causing severe and odd weather patterns, and hybridizing plants and animals to create vicious and terrifying replacements. |
| 2013 | Warframe | Third-person shooter | The Orokin were an advanced race of people capable of terraforming the entirety of the Solar System, most notable Venus, which was transformed into a cold planet through a network of coolant liquid rivers. They also deployed terraforming drones en route to the Tau Ceti system, that finally gained sentience and rebelled against their masters.. |
| 2017 | Horizon Zero Dawn | Action RPG | After the end of all life on Earth due to the Faro Plague, an AI is responsible to recreate and restore all life on Earth, terraforming it from lifelessness. |
| 2019 | The Outer Worlds | Action RPG | After colony ships depart Earth to colonize Halcyon, they terraform planets to better fit human life. It is explained in the setting that terraforming is a relatively new science for humanity and the results are unpredictable, with the hostile moon of Monarch as an in-universe example of terraforming gone wrong with its hostile creatures and a sulfurous atmosphere that causes chronic health problems. Despite this terraforming allowing genetically modified crops to be grown, it is later discovered that food grown on these terraformed worlds is not nutritious enough to sustain all the colonists, leading to a food shortage crisis. |