Terraforming in popular culture
Terraforming is well represented in popular culture, usually in the form of science fiction.  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 (1949) and Seetee Ship (1951).  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

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 (temporarily) overpowers terrestrial vegetation.
Terraforming is one of the basic concepts around which Frank Herbert's Dune novels (1965-1985) 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 (In later books, the focus shifts to those trying to "arrakisform" earthlike planets to support the giant sandworms and produce their desired 'spice' secretion). 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 (2000) features a fictional planet, Solace, on which terraforming is failing and bringing about climatic and ecological collapse.
Liz Williams' novel The Ghost Sister (2001) 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 (2002) is set on an imagined frozen moon of 47 Ursae Majoris b which is being terraformed by induced global warming.
Building Harlequin's Moon (2005), 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 (2006) 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 (such as Corinth) 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 
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|1982
|Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
|USA
|Project Genesis, a device for rapidly terraforming worlds to make them suitable for settlement and food production is introduced.  At the end of the film, a Genesis Device is detonated in the Mutara nebula.  This results in the creation of a main sequence star and a habitable planet known as the Genesis Planet.
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|1984
|Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
|USA
|Spock's body has been resurrected by the terraforming device on the Genesis Planet, created at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  Due to unstable "proto-matter" used in the terraforming process, the planet's evolution is accelerated, leading to the eventual premature destruction of the Genesis Planet.  The nine-disc Star Trek: The Motion Picture Collection contains a director's cut of Star Trek III which has an extra featurette on the "real-science applications of terraforming". 
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|1986
|Aliens
|USA
|In the 1979 film Alien, a ship's crew sets down on planetoid LV-426, a world so environmentally hostile that the three crew members who exit the ship must wear full life support suits. In the 1986 sequel, Aliens, the planet has been terraformed using atmosphere processing equipment to an Earth-like state. The process is described as taking "decades," but is apparently so routine that the colonies responsible for it have earned the whimsical nickname "Shake N' Bake Colonies."  The Weyland Yutani corporation sports the phrase "Building Better Worlds" as its slogan, and it is implied that terraforming is a large part of its business.
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|1988
|Star Trek: The Next Generation: Home Soil
|USA
|USS Enterprise is instructed by the Federation to check on the terraforming colony on Velara III.  However, the "lifeless" planet already has an inorganic, yet intelligent alien life living below the surface.
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|1990
|Total Recall
|USA
|Aliens have built a terraforming device on Mars, which when turned on, fills the atmosphere with oxygen, allowing humans to live on the surface.    Total Recall was one of the first films to portray terraforming on Mars, however it was criticized for its scientific inaccuracy.  
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|1992
|Red Dwarf: "Terrorform"
|United Kingdom
|After a crash-landing on a psi-moon, the crew of Red Dwarf face a dark world reformed after Arnold Rimmer's subconscious.
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|1993
|Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Second Sight"
|USA
|Richard Kiley plays a terraformer who has successfully terraformed several planets.
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|1993
|Red Dwarf: "Rimmerworld"
|United Kingdom
|Arnold Rimmer, trapped on a desert planet for 600 years, uses a seeding pod's genetic and terraforming equipment to create a world of his own clones.
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|1995
|Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Past Tense"
|USA
|Venus is mentioned as currently being terraformed.
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|1996
|The Arrival
|USA
|Aliens have built multiple terraforming facilities on Earth, disguised as power plants, causing global warming by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They plan to alter the Earth to match their own ecological needs. 
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|1998-1999
|Cowboy Bebop
|Japan, USA, Canada, Europe, United Kingdom
|Many episodes take place on numerous terraformed worlds including Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Titan. While terraforming is ubiquitous, it is depicted as having varying scales, effects, and degrees of success on a case by case basis, sometimes spectacularly so in the case of Ganymede and Venus. 
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|2000
|Red Planet|USA, Australia
|After humanity faces heavy overpopulation and pollution on Earth, uncrewed space probes loaded with algae are sent to Mars with the aim of terraforming and creating a breathable atmosphere. 
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|2000
|Titan A.E.
|USA
| A human invention called "Project Titan"; Titan spacecraft have the capacity to create a new Earth.
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|2000
|Stargate SG-1: Scorched Earth|USA, Canada
|Episode centers around an attempt by an extinct alien culture to repopulate an already inhabited planet using terraforming techniques.
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|2002–03 and 2005
|Firefly and its film sequel Serenity|various
|The original planet Earth (known in the series as "Earth-That-Was") "got used up," forcing most or all of humanity to find a new star system. In the new system, they terraformed - and apparently are still terraforming - many planets and moons. Each one has been terraformed with varying degrees of success; the inner planets boast a lush climate while the outer edges of the large solar system are populated by desolate, dry moons reminiscent of the Wild West, or can be, as in the case of St. Alban's (featured in the episode The Message), bitterly cold. The movie goes one step further by actually showing what terraforming might look like, as well as stating that the process took decades.  The series takes place in the early 26th century. Possibly of note is a mention in an early Firefly episode ("The Train Job") of "each [terraformed moon or planet] ha[ving] its... quirks," including environmentally-triggered diseases such as Bodin's Malady.
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|2006
|Origin: Spirits of the Past|Japan
|Origin: Spirits of the Past is the story of Agito, a young boy living in a dystopian Japan set 300 years in the future. This apocalypse was brought about by extensive genetic engineering on trees, conducted at a research facility on Earth's moon, in order to produce trees capable of growing in harsh, arid conditions. The trees became conscious and spread to Earth in a fiery holocaust, wiping out most of modern civilization and fragmenting the moon.
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|2007
|Battle for Terra|USA
|The human colonists deploy a massive spider-like terraformer, which converts the existing atmosphere, which is poisonous to humans, into a nitrogen-oxygen mix similar to Earth's. The (apparently) only existing device is capable of converting the entire atmosphere of an Earth-like planet. The gas conversion technology also exists on smaller scales, seen inside the Ark (the colony ship).
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|2008
|Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter|United Kingdom
|The TARDIS takes The Doctor, Donna and Martha to the planet Messaline where a generations-old war between humans and Hath rages on. The Hath and humans were initially meant to live in a peaceful colony, but were divided over a dispute about "the Source" (a terraforming device), which both sides believe to be theirs.
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|2008–2013
|Fringe|USA
|Future descendants of modern humans travel back through time to 2015 due to rapidly dwindling natural resources and excessive pollution on Earth in their own time. Being from the distant future, their atmosphere requirements are significantly different from those of modern humans; their goal is to use huge farms of devices that can terraform the Earth's atmosphere into one more suitable for their needs, sacrificing modern humanity in the process.
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|2013
|Defiance|USA
|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.
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|2013
|Man of Steel|USA
|Kal-El, of the planet Krypton (dying due to natural resource exhaustion and harvesting of the planet's core), is sent to Earth by his father, Jor-El, to escape the planet's destruction and rogue military leader General Zod. Kal-El lives his life as an outcast, and forced to use his supernatural abilities (obtained through living under a yellow sun (The Sun)) to stop General Zod in his scheme to terraform Earth to become a new Krypton, killing life on Earth so the people of Krypton can have a second chance.
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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

Notes