A Half-Built Garden

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 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)