A Half-Built Garden (Paperback, en-Latn-US language, 2022, Tordotcom)
Paperback, 352 pages
en-Latn-US language
Published Jan. 1, 2022 by Tordotcom.
I have not not read, but I realize I don't want to post about every book I read. It feels stressful to me. So I want to use wyrms for posting here and then about books I want to share thoughts about
Content warning Major plot and worldbuilding spoilers
We read this for #SFFBookClub, and it started some very interesting discussions. I think I liked it, but don't even know how to give it a star rating.
I keep seeing it described as "hopepunk" or "optimistic", and that was not my reaction at all. The setting is a world in which some people have managed to reorient their lives into a watershed-based somewhat anarchist model of living within planetary resources. But... but... but...
First but: there's no sense that the damage has been restored. A pivotal moment in the story is a hurricane hitting the US East Coast at Passover - in other words climate destruction far worse than we've endured so far in the real world.
Second but: it's strongly implied that much of the world's population hasn't joined the revolution. Nation states are still important (the narrator denies this, but there seems to be a lot of implication that she's flattering her faction), corporations have been exiled to artificial islands in the high seas but remain the sole suppliers of a lot of technology.
Third and biggest but: a lot of what drives the tension of the story is the narrator's inability to see things from anyone else's perspective, to the point that the people in the other factions only really seem human when we catch glimpses from outside the narrator's eye.
Having said all that: all of these things felt very plausible to me! In the face of it, aliens show up. And the aliens are in some ways a very hopeful story: two radically different civilisations that have built some sort of hybrid culture, and now become ardent students of human culture, on a mission to save us from the destruction of our ecosystem. Fourth but: as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it really wasn't an equal marriage between those two, and their attitude to humanity is extremely paternalistic.
Much of the drama is about the human factions jockeying for position as the aliens basically decide what they're going to do with us. I appreciated how much of the power struggle plays out by means of disrupting communication, but it drove me nuts how much humans and aliens alike treated this as a contest to come to a single decision for all of humanity. I felt the obvious solution of "those who want to go with the aliens, go, those who want to stay, stay" was staring me in the face for chapter after chapter and never even seemed to be acknowledged as a possibility.
In the end I think I did like this book, but it left me feeling really down. Not an optimistic tale at all, but a deeply, deeply pessimistic one about our collective failures to see each other, and how much harder that failure makes it to deal with the mess we've got ourselves into.
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys is a beautiful, extremely Jewish, super queer story about a diverse future world facing first contact not as an alien invasion, but as something possibly more threatening: a well-intentioned helper, certain in their knowledge of what help is needed before ever setting foot on the planet.
what follows is high stakes negotiations, not just with the aliens, but also between different factions of humans (the watersheds, the corporations and the old state powers) and within factions and families. the watersheds might be healing planet earth, but the corporations still haven't learned that infinite growth isn't possible, and they everything the new visitors are offering (and more)
I won't spoil the story, but you should read this is you like complicated family dynamics that remind you of your own, complex characters with flaws and passions, weird (and interesting) gender stuff, fraught dinner parties (including a …
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys is a beautiful, extremely Jewish, super queer story about a diverse future world facing first contact not as an alien invasion, but as something possibly more threatening: a well-intentioned helper, certain in their knowledge of what help is needed before ever setting foot on the planet.
what follows is high stakes negotiations, not just with the aliens, but also between different factions of humans (the watersheds, the corporations and the old state powers) and within factions and families. the watersheds might be healing planet earth, but the corporations still haven't learned that infinite growth isn't possible, and they everything the new visitors are offering (and more)
I won't spoil the story, but you should read this is you like complicated family dynamics that remind you of your own, complex characters with flaws and passions, weird (and interesting) gender stuff, fraught dinner parties (including a Passover seder), sexy villains, space travel, queer and trans characters, advanced problem solving, or sex with aliens
I've found myself reading more Climate Fiction recently, not because I've been searching it out, I don't think, but because it's so much on everyone's mind that more is getting published. In any case, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but I've had a recent run of "climate fiction" that I would describe as optimistic. Possibly, it used to be that it felt like the urgent agenda re: The Climate was convincing everyone it was really that bad, but now it feels like the urgent agenda is convincing people that there is something to be done about it.
In any case, A Half Built Garden falls into the latter camp, but it is also a first contact story, which I am predisposed to like. In this story, the Earth is covered by autonomous but interconnected "Dandelion Networks" who work to restore Earth's ecology and strictly measure out their …
I've found myself reading more Climate Fiction recently, not because I've been searching it out, I don't think, but because it's so much on everyone's mind that more is getting published. In any case, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but I've had a recent run of "climate fiction" that I would describe as optimistic. Possibly, it used to be that it felt like the urgent agenda re: The Climate was convincing everyone it was really that bad, but now it feels like the urgent agenda is convincing people that there is something to be done about it.
In any case, A Half Built Garden falls into the latter camp, but it is also a first contact story, which I am predisposed to like. In this story, the Earth is covered by autonomous but interconnected "Dandelion Networks" who work to restore Earth's ecology and strictly measure out their carbon budget. Complicating this, governments still attempts to govern, but have lost control of many of the resources they once commanded, including much of their public support. Furthermore, "the corporations" have been firewalled away on artificial islands, for their refusal to curtail their environmental impact, but still are active and engaging in trade for goods no one else can make.
Then the aliens arrive, and our heroine is in the right place at the right time carrying the right baby to get her foot in the door first as the aliens' favourite negotiator.
I like that Earth in the future is full of petty squabbles and dumb meetings, because I can believe a lot from my speculative fiction, but not that humanity has changed that much. The Dandelion networks are supposed to be utopian, but they do not require to me to believe that everyone gets along frictionlessly. One of the key technologies that permits the dandelion networks, however, is an algorithm that facilitates collaborative decision-making, upvoting and downvoting certain kinds of discussion threads to promote decisions in line with the network's declared values, and I admit this is the point where I felt the story had introduced Unobtainium to make the plot work.
I really enjoyed that big queer family structures were central to the characters' lives and even the plot. Every society had subtly or strongly different ideas of how families and genders worked, and this gave the humans and aliens different points of friction and connection, and I felt this was well done.
I enjoyed that the aliens were very alien, both biologically and socially, but also had individual personalities.
I am going to be honest that I enjoyed this book so much that I am not actually very objective about it. I loved this book. This book for me is what Becky Chambers' books are for other people.
Does a lovely job portraying a decentralized, nerdy, queer, ecologically-attentive near future both recognizable and made deeply alien through first-contact... even as a semi-utopic didactic depiction, I wish it were a better story, the stakes and conflicts wobble erratically between gray and absolute to an overall weaker place.
I am telling everyone about this book at the moment!! Myriad delightful details. And it feels like a future I would want to live in!
As the title says: queer solarpunk first-contact sci-fi!
Recommended for anyone that liked:
It definitely has some weird bits, not necessarily in a negative sense. I enjoyed this a bunch and kept telling people about during my travels in the past weeks—so that's probably a better recommendation indicator than anything!
The author even coined a potential subgenre in describing the book: diaperpunk!
I get so tired of the narrative that humans are always going to choose the worst and most selfish means of planet stewardship, and this book is tired of it too! It’s one of those novels I put down and immediately begin longing for its vision of the future’s so badly it feels like I’ve lost something tangible. How much time do we have to get the watershed networks and dandelion networks underway and beat back the corporations? I’m ready to meet some aliens.
Wow this story blew me away. The future that the author paints and the way that the dandelion networks operate is really a true work of art. I loved the characters, the themes, and the perspective of this book. It gave me a spike in my already-elevated levels of climate anxiety right in time for the Inflation Reduction Act to get passed, so it coincidentally made that win much sweeter (even though that bill isn't perfect).
Giving the book 4.5 stars instead ofb5 because I felt a bit of a disconnect between my reading style and the authors writing style that made it difficult to comprehend some sentences on a first read. Nothing too difficult, just a bit of a disconnect where I had to read sentences a few times and it knocked me out of the reading flow.
This book is really beautiful because it does what we need …
Wow this story blew me away. The future that the author paints and the way that the dandelion networks operate is really a true work of art. I loved the characters, the themes, and the perspective of this book. It gave me a spike in my already-elevated levels of climate anxiety right in time for the Inflation Reduction Act to get passed, so it coincidentally made that win much sweeter (even though that bill isn't perfect).
Giving the book 4.5 stars instead ofb5 because I felt a bit of a disconnect between my reading style and the authors writing style that made it difficult to comprehend some sentences on a first read. Nothing too difficult, just a bit of a disconnect where I had to read sentences a few times and it knocked me out of the reading flow.
This book is really beautiful because it does what we need speculative cli-fi to do - it imagines a future world in ways that inspire hope and action. Particularly as an IT person who works with a conservation science org, this book shifted the way I see both digital networks and also conservation work.
Very well worth reading.
