Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Tordotcom (2022), 352 pages
Description
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach. On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm--and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force. But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world livable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal our wounded planet. Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone's eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member dukedom_enough
The year is 2083. Judy Wallach-Stevens, while monitoring environmental sensors for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, sees a phosphate surge in the Potomac River. She heads out with her baby and her wife, expecting something routine - only to find an alien spacecraft, landed by the river. Baby
Much of the future Earth is organized into watershed networks like Judy's, conserving carbon footprints, intensively monitoring every environmental parameter, continuously improving their methods and knowledge of the Earth system. The watersheds are linked by the dandelion network, a social-media system optimized to promote expertise and consensus in online discussions. Despite a year-round hurricane season, too many extinctions, and a billion people dead in disasters, they think they are making progress toward saving the planet.
But the Ringers solved their own, similar problems thousands of years ago by abandoning their planets and building a Dyson swarm around their sun. Of the several planetary civilizations the two Ringer species have detected, the Earth's is the first that has not become extinct before their arrival. To the aliens, the lesson is imperative. Humans must leave Earth, turning it into building material for vast space settlements, starting soon.
The corporations and governments that wrecked Earth's climate are still around, their scope and power much reduced from our time. The corporations' responses to the Ringers' proposal are less Earth-friendly, aimed at restoring their former power, but also more in tune with the Ringers than those of the watersheds. The US Government also gets involved in negotiations, particularly NASA, still pursuing dreams of humans in space - and are those dreams really so bad? Meanwhile, the dandelion network has been hacked, and the best ideas are no longer foregrounded.
Community is the core of Emrys' story. The dandelion networks, comprising "...algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving...", support a view of the individual in society radically different from many that prevail today. Judy wants to operate with constant updates from the network, not with her own decisions - quite differently from SF's standard, heroic, lone protagonists. Beyond the networks, Judy's family and neighborhood, very progressive by today's standards, support her quest to save Earth by directly helping her, and by being a good place to live, where old prejudices have faded - two of the four adults in her household are trans, for example. A crucial plot turn occurs at a Passover seder.
The aliens have their own version of community. They originate from two habitable planets in the same star system - the second species are 9 foot tall, 10 legged furry spiders, sort of, who dwell in trees. A central metaphor for the paired species is their long-ago first contact, when the scaled plains-people reached the planet of the neighboring tree-people: "That's what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other - we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together." It's common for alien families to include persons of both species. Can Judy bring networks, aliens, and Earthly rivals to an understanding that leaves our planet intact?
These are Hal Clement aliens, really. Communication between us and them comes too easily, in service of getting to the ideas part of the story, just as Clement used to do it. The reader must make allowances here. One also misses discussion of the implied, unending, impossible, exponential growth that the aliens' system seems to aim for, which would be an obvious line of argument for Judy and her allies. And there's no mention of the Fermi Paradox, integral to thinking about intelligent life elsewhere.
Emrys has done a great job imagining a climate-stressed future that is not the usual doomscape. Even the corporation minions are not a straight-line extrapolation of today's conservative rich people - for example, their system of personal pronouns is way more complex than that of the watershed networks or anything today. And social media that amplifies facts and sound opinion, not lies? Tell us more. I rarely say this about a book, but this refreshingly optimistic novel could have benefited from being longer. Thinking about it was fun.
Ruthanna Emrys puts acknowledgments at the end for some of her inspirations for this novel. I rate it an extra half star for her friend [[Malka Older]]'s coining of the term "diaperpunk".
Show More
Dori does what babies do, and Judy must change a diaper in view of the ship. The alien expedition leader emerges: shaped long and low, with many limbs, eyes on stalks, scaled - and she is feeding her own two babies from her body somewhat as Judy does for Dori. The "Ringers" are most insistent on including children in meetings and negotiations, and Judy has inadvertently passed the aliens' first test for humanity. Other tests will follow.Much of the future Earth is organized into watershed networks like Judy's, conserving carbon footprints, intensively monitoring every environmental parameter, continuously improving their methods and knowledge of the Earth system. The watersheds are linked by the dandelion network, a social-media system optimized to promote expertise and consensus in online discussions. Despite a year-round hurricane season, too many extinctions, and a billion people dead in disasters, they think they are making progress toward saving the planet.
But the Ringers solved their own, similar problems thousands of years ago by abandoning their planets and building a Dyson swarm around their sun. Of the several planetary civilizations the two Ringer species have detected, the Earth's is the first that has not become extinct before their arrival. To the aliens, the lesson is imperative. Humans must leave Earth, turning it into building material for vast space settlements, starting soon.
The corporations and governments that wrecked Earth's climate are still around, their scope and power much reduced from our time. The corporations' responses to the Ringers' proposal are less Earth-friendly, aimed at restoring their former power, but also more in tune with the Ringers than those of the watersheds. The US Government also gets involved in negotiations, particularly NASA, still pursuing dreams of humans in space - and are those dreams really so bad? Meanwhile, the dandelion network has been hacked, and the best ideas are no longer foregrounded.
Community is the core of Emrys' story. The dandelion networks, comprising "...algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving...", support a view of the individual in society radically different from many that prevail today. Judy wants to operate with constant updates from the network, not with her own decisions - quite differently from SF's standard, heroic, lone protagonists. Beyond the networks, Judy's family and neighborhood, very progressive by today's standards, support her quest to save Earth by directly helping her, and by being a good place to live, where old prejudices have faded - two of the four adults in her household are trans, for example. A crucial plot turn occurs at a Passover seder.
The aliens have their own version of community. They originate from two habitable planets in the same star system - the second species are 9 foot tall, 10 legged furry spiders, sort of, who dwell in trees. A central metaphor for the paired species is their long-ago first contact, when the scaled plains-people reached the planet of the neighboring tree-people: "That's what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other - we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together." It's common for alien families to include persons of both species. Can Judy bring networks, aliens, and Earthly rivals to an understanding that leaves our planet intact?
These are Hal Clement aliens, really. Communication between us and them comes too easily, in service of getting to the ideas part of the story, just as Clement used to do it. The reader must make allowances here. One also misses discussion of the implied, unending, impossible, exponential growth that the aliens' system seems to aim for, which would be an obvious line of argument for Judy and her allies. And there's no mention of the Fermi Paradox, integral to thinking about intelligent life elsewhere.
Emrys has done a great job imagining a climate-stressed future that is not the usual doomscape. Even the corporation minions are not a straight-line extrapolation of today's conservative rich people - for example, their system of personal pronouns is way more complex than that of the watershed networks or anything today. And social media that amplifies facts and sound opinion, not lies? Tell us more. I rarely say this about a book, but this refreshingly optimistic novel could have benefited from being longer. Thinking about it was fun.
Ruthanna Emrys puts acknowledgments at the end for some of her inspirations for this novel. I rate it an extra half star for her friend [[Malka Older]]'s coining of the term "diaperpunk".
Show Less
LibraryThing member lavaturtle
This is my new favorite book! I want to recommend it to a bunch of people right now. I love the thoughtful picture of what a future for humanity could look like, the cultural differences and communication challenges with the aliens, the wonderfully diverse cast of human characters, the ideas about
Show More
technology for building/maintaining community... There's just a whole lot here that's brilliant and well-done and desperately needed. And I love how the protagonist's values and decisions are rooted in her family, background, and community. Show Less
LibraryThing member Jthierer
A Half-Built Garden tells the story of Judy, a woman who is part of a commune like community in the near future, who, with her wife and young daughter, are the first people to encounter extraterrestrials. They come in peace...but they also want humanity to abandon Earth to come with them to the
Show More
stars. The rest of the book deals with the conflict of Judy's deep desire to stay on Earth with the pressure from the aliens and other Earth factions to take them up on their offer and migrate. From a plot/premise perspective, I liked this one, but the author seems very very sure of their stance that corporations are inherently evil, community decision making is ALWAYS best, single-family households will eventually fade away in favor of communal child-rearing, etc.... While I don't necessarily disagree with any of those stances (or at least don't disagree with them to the extent that I couldn't continue) there was an air of smugness about the writing that felt distasteful to me and made certain events entirely predictable to the reader. Show Less
LibraryThing member Shrike58
File under: Respect rather than like. I respect Emrys' world-building, writing, and giving us a different take on First Contact. On the other hand, I'm not going to pretend that I related all that well to most of characters, and there was a bit too much minutiae of motherhood; though having never
Show More
been a parent might contribute to that. I'm still happy to have gotten a new novel from Emrys. Show Less
LibraryThing member Guide2
A first contact novel set in the mid-near future discussing many different topics ranging from Global Warming to gender identity and colonization. Quite well written, although the motivation for some of the actions in the last section seemed somewhat less coherent at times, but given those specific
Show More
ones were from the alien point of view, the author definitely has the last word on it. Following up on all the genders in the corporate world was too confusing for me. Show Less
LibraryThing member jennybeast
I think this book is spectacular, in the very best traditions of near future speculative fiction, and absolutely fulfilling the promise of such literature to explore grave topics of great importance. I also found it weirdly distressing to read.
Things I loved:
A compelling portrait of our near future
The way this tackles family, spouses, offspring and a type of mind blowing maternal supremacy.
The believability of a totally different type of alien contact.
Excellent characters who are complex and interesting and appealing.
Lots of pronouns, genders, family constructs, social games — it’s really interesting.
Well-handled character who’s missing an arm. Well handled because it doesn’t define her, she has tech that sometimes assists her, and on the whole it’s just an unremarkable part of her life.
The distressing — I think I just found the whole thing too believable, and it grieves me deeply to think of the damage we continue to do to the world. Also, one of the central tenets of the book is the assertion that all civilizations reach a point where they must use technology to abandon the limitations of planetary life — that there comes a point in species advancement where the choice is extinction of ourselves or our planet. The whole point of the book is to explore this idea, but somehow having it spelled out like that just devastates me.
Anyway. I think it’s brilliant, and I keep thinking about it.
Things I loved:
A compelling portrait of our near future
Show More
world, and the ways that environment and science might fuse to allow climate collectives to actively heal the earth + a really explicit conversation about the harm corporations do and the angst we all feel about why that is central to a lot of our cultures.The way this tackles family, spouses, offspring and a type of mind blowing maternal supremacy.
The believability of a totally different type of alien contact.
Excellent characters who are complex and interesting and appealing.
Lots of pronouns, genders, family constructs, social games — it’s really interesting.
Well-handled character who’s missing an arm. Well handled because it doesn’t define her, she has tech that sometimes assists her, and on the whole it’s just an unremarkable part of her life.
The distressing — I think I just found the whole thing too believable, and it grieves me deeply to think of the damage we continue to do to the world. Also, one of the central tenets of the book is the assertion that all civilizations reach a point where they must use technology to abandon the limitations of planetary life — that there comes a point in species advancement where the choice is extinction of ourselves or our planet. The whole point of the book is to explore this idea, but somehow having it spelled out like that just devastates me.
Anyway. I think it’s brilliant, and I keep thinking about it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member yarmando
Brilliant "First Contact" novel, the aliens arriving with the (reasonable) assumption that technological species cannot survive on the limited resources of their planet, and they've come to bring humanity to the stars.
Why I picked it up: Cory Doctorow recommended it during a presentation I was
Why I finished it: I was riveted by the idea of the dandelion network protocols, AI-empowered Reddit threads as a means of consensus governing. There were some small missteps, hints of story complications that vanished, but they were unimportant (and perhaps might be fodder for sequels, prequels, or side-novellas that Emrys has planned).
I'd give it to: I think this is notable SF, suitable for anyone interested in the latest the genre has to offer.
Why I picked it up: Cory Doctorow recommended it during a presentation I was
Show More
listening to. I can see why: the watershed networks are very much in line with what he imagines in "Walkaway" and "Makers."Why I finished it: I was riveted by the idea of the dandelion network protocols, AI-empowered Reddit threads as a means of consensus governing. There were some small missteps, hints of story complications that vanished, but they were unimportant (and perhaps might be fodder for sequels, prequels, or side-novellas that Emrys has planned).
I'd give it to: I think this is notable SF, suitable for anyone interested in the latest the genre has to offer.
Show Less
LibraryThing member nmele
Set fifty or sixty years from the present, in a world where the powers of corporations and nation-states are less important than today. a newer power center has emerged in the form of watershed-wide networks whose members work at healing the earth of the effects of pollution and global warming.
Show More
Into this work in progress comes am embassy from an advanced civilization of two different alien species who come to rescue humanity. The story is both intimate and sweeping, imaginative and exciting. I'd give Ruthanna Emrys every award possible for this novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member mmparker
I'm going to have to read this one again. This was a really challenging one for me, in part because found the protagonist's "Slack plus StackOverflow" decision-making culture to be, uh, way more abhorrent than the author probably thought I would. I generally disliked most of the characters, and I
Show More
didn't think the aliens were alien enough, or it was too easy for them to achieve human cultural fluency. But in spite of all that, I still finished it and I still put the "i-recommend" tag on there, because it's just so unusual and so full of ideas. I'll read it again and so should you, if you're feeling open-minded. Show Less
Awards
Utopia Award (Nominee — 2023)
Original language
English
Original publication date
2022-07-26
Physical description
352 p.; 8.65 inches
ISBN
1250210984 / 9781250210982