Half-Built Garden

I enjoy a good first contact story. In this version aliens touch down in the Chesapeake Watershed. A woman is sent out in the middle of the night to monitor some new contaminants and stumbles across the spaceshipI quite enjoyed the world building in this story. In this version of the 2080s, river networks are the organizing basis for large populations of ecologically minded people who strive to live in cooperation while actively working to heal the Earth. Basically, take everything that would make conservative Americans start to hyperventilate and make a society out of it. I loved it. Can we have that please?
The people at the center of this story are a Jewish polyamorous queer couple with an infant who have just set up a household with two co-parents who have a toddler. They are just starting to work out how their household will function when they suddenly have to try to figure out how to blend the desires of three species. I liked that decisions were made basically in real-time Reddit threads with discussions between anyone logged in and moderated by algorithms that make sure that the decision represents the agreed upon community values. It also shows what can happen when technology like this that is heavily relied on is sabotaged. There are humans who don't like this set up. There is still a United States government representing some humans. Followers of corporations live on artificial islands in a very different societal system. This book is dense with ideas and interactions. That made it a slow read for me. I had to pay very close attention to what was happening every moment. There are ideas in this book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

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.

Gender, sexuality, climate change, parenting, religion, inter-species symbiosis, inter-species relationships, corporations, governments, communes, and more.

I enjoyed this book, but it did feel like there was a LOT going on sometimes. Occasionally rabbit hole on a particular topic went a bit deeper than felt warranted. For example I appreciated how much gender played a role in this book, but some of the discussions about gender signaling and pronouns felt very lengthy. I imagine if this were made into a movie those discussions wouldn't make the cut and the viewer would simply be expected to pick up on those elements of world building (there would be more showing of how different societies handle gender and less explaining of it).

I also wished some of the characters had a bit more depth at times. At times this felt a bit like a long short story. I still enjoyed it though.

I appreciated the reference to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower that was thrown in somewhere: "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change."

I do wish the aliens were more alien (like Octavia Butler's Dawn). That would have made some of the alien-human contact moments much more challenging to write though.