Sandy Jennings, an orphan and a red-headed Ph.D. student in microbiology, is recruited into a terraforming project by a group of several hundred time travelers who work in a loosely defined, non-authoritarian structure that spans years of their lifetimes and eons of the planet’s time. Sandy is not seen in the third and fourth stories, which show nick-of-time recruitments of volcanologist Simon Hardacre and plankton expert Haru.

I liked these last two stories, especially the character of Haru, but I longed for more development beyond what Sandy had already shown us of their common universe.
Knowledge, absolute and definite knowledge of the future as it affects yourself, is never any use. Whether it is bad or good, you cannot do anything that will change it. It simply takes away your power to decide.

Variants

(1)
  1. “Time-Traveling Terraformers” by Pauline Ashwell, in Analog, August 1995.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Pauline Ashwell