37
votes
A story about tiny beings
Surface Tension, James Blish, Galaxy Science Fiction, 1952.
From Wikipedia:
A human colonization ship crash-lands on a distant planet which is
Earth-like but whose only landmass is completely covered ...
- 17k
23
votes
Accepted
Book series about using wormholes and time travel to reduce decades of space travel to days
The Chronicles of Solace Series, by Roger MacBride Allen
This is a series of three novels:
The Depths of Time (2000)
The Ocean of Years (2002)
The Shores of Tomorrow (2003)
Wormholes — separated by ...
- 17.5k
21
votes
Accepted
Story about two rival crews terraforming a planet
This is Jack Vance's novelette "The World Between" (1953), also known as "Ecological Onslaught".
It has the two competing terraforming crews, from planets called Blue Star and Kay ...
- 21.1k
21
votes
Accepted
Short story about alien creatures fleeing their home planet to terraform another
This sounds very much like "The Keys to December", a short story by Roger Zelazny.
The alien race are genetically engineered humans that resemble ocelots. The protagonist, Jarry (so, close ...
- 72.1k
14
votes
Accepted
1970s short story where USA wants to terraform Mars, Communist China wants to settle Mars via pantropy, USSR is defunct
I think you're looking for "Deadlock" by Robert and Barbara Silverberg, Astounding, January 1959. It was reprinted in the Silverberg collection The Shores of Tomorrow (1976).
Quoting the ...
- 143k
12
votes
Accepted
Trying to find story, with an alien race who was digging tunnels to change planet's rotation and eventually orbit
The book you're looking for is Orphan Star by Alan Dean Foster. It's the third book in the Flinx and Pip series. From the Wiki:
The novel takes place in 550 A.A. (After Amalgamation in Foster’s
...
- 1,670
11
votes
Accepted
A planet on the edge between anaerobic and aerobic life forms. Possibly by Asimov
This is "Founding Father" by Asimov, originally published in the October 1965 issue of Galaxy.
An exploratory spacecraft of the Galactic Corps, charged with opening
up planets for human ...
- 1,909
11
votes
Accepted
Book series with terraforming crew and ecstasy trees
This sounds like The Expendables Series by Richard Avery (Edmund Cooper), about 4 books I think.
The Deathworms of Kratos,
The Rings of Tantalus,
The War Games of Zelos,
The Venom of Argus
There was ...
- 2,031
10
votes
Short story - engineered human terraforming civilized planet
Walter Jon Willams, "Dinosaurs", 1987
Millions of years in the future, humanity has evolved and engineered itself along specialized branches. One such human, a diplomat named Drill, travels ...
- 17.5k
8
votes
Circa 1980's prehistoric intelligent reptiles starving and time traveling and terraforming present day Earth for survival
This looks like it could be one of the books from the "Time For Dragons" Trilogy.
NB I haven't read it personally.
Information on these books on the internet is pretty scarce, but I found this ...
- 6,440
8
votes
Accepted
Graphic novel involving xenoforming of Earth by a malicious intelligence
Singularity 7 (2004) by Ben Templesmith?
From Wikipedia:
The comic tells the story of how Earth was forever changed after alien nanites arrived in a meteor shower. The nanites, able to shift the ...
- 58.3k
8
votes
Accepted
Wake up a planet by detonating deep down in the core?
If the planet to be rejuvenated is the Earth in the far future, you could be thinking of City at World's End, a 1950 novel by Edmund Hamilton which was also the answer to this old question. What ...
- 171k
7
votes
Accepted
Story about early stages of terraforming Mars and opposition to the project?
Sounds very much like Patrick Moore's 1950s juvenile The Voices of Mars.
I no longer have a copy, but iirc the book ends with the hero collapsing from the effects of Earth gravity while addressing a ...
- 13.7k
5
votes
Accepted
Sci-Fi novel about immortal planet morphers
Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny. Here's the beginning of the novel:
Life is a thing—if you’ll excuse a quick dab of philosophy before you know what kind of picture I’m painting—that reminds me ...
- 7,042
4
votes
Scifi anthology - Contains terraforming robots story
I think this is Walter Jon Williams' "Dinosaurs" as the commenter above suggests
The story that caught my attention was about a mammalian species that recently had to destroy some "...
- 60.7k
4
votes
Book taking place on a partially terraformed ice world with an artificial moon
The Snows of Jaspre. Been looking for this book for years.
An artificial sun awakens psychic powers on an ice planet. The original Finnish settlers, who thrived on the frozen wastes of Jaspre, ...
- 41
4
votes
Sci-fi novel set on an ocean planet with genetically modified aquatic humans and terraforming process
I was searching for the same thing/same terms and Blueheart (1996) by Alison Sinclair was the right answer for me.
There’s all the stuff about modified humans, terraforming and the conflict between ...
- 41
1
vote
ID Help: Soviet SciFi Novel - moon colonization, pre-1958
Le Continent du ciel
A long shot, as it is originally French, is Paul Berna's YA novel Continent in the Sky (Le Continent du ciel), 1955; a sequel to Threshold of the Stars (La Porte des étoiles), ...
- 21.1k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible