Sudden, fortuitous rainstorms quench forest fires and then rapidly dissipate. So when Proteus Unlimited, a greedy interstellar corporation, plans to terraform Prokaryon, first mining it and then making it habitable by normal humans, thereby netting huge profits, the search for native intelligent life becomes a frantic race against time. Lost in this shuffle of bureaucracy and greed is this simple colony of orphans, whose settlement will be wiped out if the entire surface of the planet is boiled off. It was serialized in Analog magazine, and published by Tor in hardcover and paperback. But adults take years to get lifeshaped, and it's very costly.
Young children are easier to lifeshape, because their immune systems are less developed.
The story is about a colony of children rescued from the plague-ridden planet L'li. They have to survive the hazards of Prokaryon, while impatient Elysians threaten to terraform it. At the same time, she tackles a wide range of moral issues, from overpopulation to ecological responsibility and the ethics of machine intelligence. Remarkably, Slonczewski accomplishes all of this in a story that is not only exciting but also filled with memorable characters, human, alien, and sentient machine. She is a fully mature writer, and this is the finest science fiction novel I have read this year.