Paperback, 352 pages
en-Latn-US language
Published Jan. 1, 2022 by Tordotcom.
I’ve heard people call Ruthanna Emrys is an inheritor of Le Guin’s legacy, but Octavia Butler is all over this book; a kinder future than Parable of the Sower, with (usually) kinder aliens than Xenogenesis. Speaks to my anarchist heartstrings. Only 4/5 and not 5 because I found the corporate society immersion-breaking-ly gimmicky, but besides that a beautiful, rich, hopeful picture of the future.
A lot to like here, but I have stalled out partway through twice now. Will probably not finish it.
This book has the courage to imagine a world where we actually deal with climate change. It is heartwarming in so many ways - its optimism about humanity, the queer found family, the ability of humanity to teach aliens useful things.
The aliens and the space travel are rather fantastical - there is magic language translation, magic antigravity, magic FTL. The tech that the Watershed networks feels deeply unrealistic and facepalm-inducing on so many points.
But I forgive the book for all of its inaccurracies because of how few authors are even trying to envision a world where we deal with climate change. I know only of three books that have tried this - the other two being The Ministry for the Future, and the Lost Cause. And this is the only one that doesn't have magic cryptocurrency save the day.
When compared against Ministry for the Future & The …
This book has the courage to imagine a world where we actually deal with climate change. It is heartwarming in so many ways - its optimism about humanity, the queer found family, the ability of humanity to teach aliens useful things.
The aliens and the space travel are rather fantastical - there is magic language translation, magic antigravity, magic FTL. The tech that the Watershed networks feels deeply unrealistic and facepalm-inducing on so many points.
But I forgive the book for all of its inaccurracies because of how few authors are even trying to envision a world where we deal with climate change. I know only of three books that have tried this - the other two being The Ministry for the Future, and the Lost Cause. And this is the only one that doesn't have magic cryptocurrency save the day.
When compared against Ministry for the Future & The Lost Cause, I'd say Half-Built Garden shines the strongest - it actually has societal change that feels suitable to the task and a world that feels worth working towards.
I wanted to like this book more. And the beginning and the ending were compelling and easy to get through. I really liked the ideas about decentralized systems that was part of the world building, and how technology and nature can exist in symbiosis.
That said, perhaps I wasn't a fan of the writing style? There was a family drama in the center of the story, but I did not find those conflicts to add a lot of meaningful tension to the overall story.
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
Really excellent SciFi, described by the author as "diaperpunk" but I'd argue also in the vein of solarpunk. I have some issues with the central premise seemingly involving a forced conflict (where no side sems to entertain a compromise until the end). But it's thoughtful and unique and makes you think in the ways good SciFi does, and therefore still well worth the read.
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.
Highly recommend. Felt like Le Guin. I loved everything about this--to the point that I don't even know how to say it except thrusting it into your reading hands. It's just wonderful. I'm going to buy it and make a yearly re-read along with The Dispossessed.
I love the conflicts, I love the characters, I love the playfulness of super big questions, I love how it's hopeful in ways that feel doable, I love the dating, I love the family stuff, I love the perpetually annoyed folks, there's just a lot about this that I like.
I am torn on this book. The author has so many wonderful ideas and the book is completely worth reading for that alone. On the other side though, I feel she did not do a very good job of building a story to showcase those ideas. At times it felt like the ideas were running the entire narrative, causing characters to behave oddly out of pattern just to move the story on to the next idea. Reading this often felt like a grind to get to the end, but I kept turning pages because the concepts were so engaging.
I wanted to like the story but had trouble with the implausibilities. Interesting themes like algorithmic governance, ecological integration with technology, and collaborative family redefinition kept me going and were ultimately more rewarding.
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 want everything the new visitors are offering (and more)
I won't spoil the story, but you should read this if 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 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 want everything the new visitors are offering (and more)
I won't spoil the story, but you should read this if 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
Content warning minor spoilers
A Half-Built Garden is an extremely hopeful climate fiction / first contact / self-proclaimed "diaperpunk" science fiction novel. Lots of Becky Chambers-esque comfort reading vibes here and would recommend this to folks looking for a story about optimism and communities and finding shared values across cultures. Also, the aliens are huge human nerds and have watched too much bollywood and anime.
Personally, I imagine this book's plot hook a bit as an alternate universe Xenogenesis. (Sorry I know I know I bring this book up all the time, but it's one that really sticks to your bones.) Xenogenesis is about the extremely heteronormative patronizing Oankali coming to a failing earth and wanting to save humans and selfishly force them into symbiosis. This book tells the story of a slightly more future earth where corporations have lost power (but still exist) and the earth is being rebuilt by "dandelion networks" who forced corporations into submission and are focused on watersheds and ecological rebuilding. The earth here is a titular "half-built garden" which is still very much in progress when the aliens show up. But instead of the Oankali having so much power that consent cannot exist, the Ringers in this book have power but are more open to discussion and humanity trying to form community with aliens on their own terms.
One of the things I think the book did really well is that there a lot of different identities (parents, Jewish, trans, polyam especially) that are integrally tied into the book's theme and plot. The book largely focuses on the protagonist Judy and her family and is a first contact book about aliens who deeply value children, mothers, and family. Metaphorically, aliens see humanity as small children who don't know how unsafe they are being and a lot of the struggle is negotiating with aliens to be seen as people so to speak. There's a lot going on with gender as well; there's multiple trans folks (with different paths and feelings about being trans), and they use their voices to speak up for giving others the freedom to choose their own paths that are not predetermined. Also, a climactic seder scene! The whole book is ultimately is about what is freedom and dealing with exile and asking questions. I'm not Jewish but this whole scene just worked so well.
On top of that, I do love a book with gender stuff going on. We got multiple trans people. We got corporation folks who put on gender masks (prince, princess, butch, femme, "neither", "naked") in public for power games, but keep their true selves hidden at home. We've got matriarchal heteronormative aliens who have big biological mother hangups and need to get over themselves. We've got multiple novel family structures. We've got multiple neopronouns. We've got pronoun pins. Yes, please!
One small thing I enjoyed is that there's an alien romance that felt very real here? Like, the characters involved all believably talk about the interpersonal reasons why they feel supported and have a personal connection. There's negotiation and awkward discussion of "what all does this even look like" in all senses. There's metamour teasing. It just felt very believable. Also there's an amazing awkward "parents just showed up after alien sex and we have to go downstairs and introduce them" moment.
At any rate, I really enjoyed this book a lot. I need more optimism like this in my fiction diet.
(tagging #SFFBookClub as this was the Sep 2023 book)
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.
