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sophia_sol) wrote2023-04-12 07:07 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2023-04-12 07:07 pm
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
This is a fascinating novel about first contact with aliens in the relatively near future, that's doing great things around ideas of what we owe to the Earth in terms of mitigating the environmental harm we've caused through climate change and other destructive actions. Not everything about the book worked for me, but I think it is still overall very worth reading.
The basic set-up: in the near-ish future, much of the earth is now organized not around countries and nationalism, but around "dandelion networks" where you belong to the network of whatever river you live in the drainage basin for. Within that network everyone has a voice – all humans, but also their communication technology is set up to provide voices for the natural environment as well, so that any decisions properly take into account the needs of the ecosystems around them. The dandelion networks are closely entwined with their local environment and feel a great deal of pride for the way they're managing to turn things around and make human life on earth sustainable long-term. However, not everyone is part of a dandelion network; there's still some nation-states hanging on to existence, though with much less control, and also corporations have been stripped of their power but are not gone and have become basically their own little nation-states as well.
In this context, an alien ship arrives, landing in the Chesapeake network, who want to save all humans from what they see as an urgently dying planet! Who gets to decide who is communicating with the aliens on behalf of all humans? What will the various groups do to make sure their voice is heard? What values should direct everyone's actions in this fraught first contact? Judy, our viewpoint character, happens to be first on the scene when the aliens land, and ends up being the main liaison from the dandelion networks to the aliens as a result, but Judy and her priorities don't get to stand alone for long.
I love this set-up, and I love the themes the book is exploring. All the nature imagery, and the conscious hard work going into keeping the earth thriving as much as possible, and the history of activism that underlies all the dandelion networks' current work.
And the way that creating relationships is depicted as something requiring work and attention to grow them into something full of trust and understanding. Judy's relationship with her wife, Carol, is shown to be already strong and deep and loving and supportive, but Judy and Carol's relationship with their co-parents, Dinar and Athëo, is still new and fragile. But there's also the humans' relationships with their planet, and the dandelion networks' relationships with their local governments, and with the corporations, and with the aliens – and the aliens relationships within themselves as well. I love all of this! And the smaller-scale and larger-scale relationships are like, thematically resonant with each other in a very effective way.
But I think to talk about this book in further detail I'm going to need to go behind a spoiler cut!
Ok so first...the aliens. So there are two different species of aliens who come to earth together! These two species met each other and formed a relationship with each other a very long time ago, and have carefully worked out how to have a mutually beneficial relationship with each other. I thought this was so interesting and well done and I loved learning more about their history and culture and ways of relating to each other and variance of opinions within each group.
But also, I am eternally torn between wanting to read about truly alien aliens, and wanting aliens who can successfully communicate and form relationships with humans on a first-contact time scale. And these ones honestly just felt like humans in funny hats. The corporate humans seemed just as alien to our main characters as the actual outer-space aliens did. And like, that might have been thematically the point or something? Which is valid. But then why even bother having aliens? It felt to me too far in the direction of the way that literary fiction treats speculative fiction ideas, where the only facet of value is the metaphorical point, instead of making the speculative elements make concrete sense contextually as well.
Because I just couldn't believe in them as being aliens from another world. And you can go so much more alien than this without taking them into the realm of unrelatable, so I really wish this book had!
And like, the aliens are similar enough that Judy and Carol start dating one of the aliens. Within, if I'm remembering the timelines correctly, weeks of knowing him? And they're SO chill about it, as if it's no different than deciding to date another human. Which sure, maybe they're that kind of people, but even that isn't marked as a thing. It's as if the narrative is of the opinion that it's normal to be chill about dating cross-species. It just felt off to me.
Second...the humans! Okay so we spend most of our time with the Chesapeake watershed, and especially with Judy's family, and there's a lot that's great about this. I really enjoyed seeing this household still in the early days of learning to be family with each other, and the ways in which things are easy and the ways in which things are hard, and the ways their families of origin affect what they bring to their current relationships.
We also see some of what it's like to live in a watershed organized into a dandelion networks, and overall it's pretty good! I think a lot of the way the author constructed the dandelion networks is about trying to create what might be an imperfect but believably-better future, which is one of the things scifi is for! Allowing us to imagine what might be!
BUT. The way they are all constantly connected to and interacting with what's basically their watershed's local reddit / neighbourhood email listserv, via their brains, feels to me like it would be enormously overwhelming overload. Judy feels incomplete when she doesn't have access to the network, and it's the fundamental way dandelion networks function. How do people who can't handle that fit in?
When Judy travels to meet the corporate people in their home environment and she finds that overwhelming, she asks how people who can't handle it manage to fit in and live, and she gets an answer to that, but being part of a dandelion network is never shown to be something that someone who is raised within such a network could ever be uncomfortable with.
As well: gender. Gender functions differently amongst all the different groups in the book, both human groups and alien groups, and they all kind of feel weird about each other's genders because it's so different from their own norms. But within each group, too, we see people who are uncomfortable with their own culture's way of doing gender, and have a role or an identity that doesn't fit the expected framework. Which is all so much fun, because of course even with wildly different gender expectations there will always be the occasional weirdo who doesn't fit in!
That is to say, within each group except in the dandelion networks. I don't recall ever seeing a character who's part of a dandelion network who has any issue with the trinary gender system (he, she, and they) that you have the option of choosing between within their framework. Were there any??
These facets and some other stuff about the general tone of the book kind of make me feel like, even with the ways that the dandelion networks are shown to be imperfect, there is still an underlying attitude that of COURSE the ideals of the dandelion networks are the best ones to strive for. And like......I do agree with so much of what the dandelion networks are doing! But as soon as you try to tell me what the only "right" thing to think is, I get all curmudgeonly about it, you know?
I'm not sure whether I'm being fair to the book on this point tbh. Is the tone I feel like I'm picking up on something that's only in my head? I don't know! But this made it really hard for me to love the dandelion networks, even as I intellectually admired so much of what they were doing.
Anyway it turns out that the culture I am most fascinated by of all the cultures in this book is the corporate culture! They're still in many ways corporations, but the way they've developed internal understandings of gender and social interaction in unique ways are so interesting. Even the dandelion network folks think that within a few generations they'll just be another human culture with a bloody history rather than still being actively the corporations that nearly destroyed the earth.
We only see glimpses of corporate culture, and nearly all from the viewpoint of people who are antagonistic towards them, but I want to know more! Plus I find a number of the corporate characters fascinating. Intern Adrien who loves to play the game and is willing to put aside any morals for the sake of advancement. Brend, Adrien's sibling, who loves Adrien but struggles with normal socialization within the corporate environment, and with some of the values that the corporations maintain. Tiffany, whose relationship with Brend is the most important thing, to be ranked above all else when making decisions, and does not care about ethics for the sake of ethics even a little. They're all so fascinating!
(and like, oh hmm yeah of course two of my favourite characters are Brend and Tiffany, the weirdos who don't fit in anywhere, that does check out doesn't it)
And okay yes this was a whole enormous pile of words analysing my not entirely positive feelings towards this book, but overall I think what I want to say about it is that it's interesting and thoughtful enough to be WORTH arguing with! I enjoyed thinking about it, I enjoyed spending time with these characters, there were some moments I found genuinely touching and emotional, and I argue because me and the book are both united in caring about things. So I do recommend it! And please come argue with me about this book!
The basic set-up: in the near-ish future, much of the earth is now organized not around countries and nationalism, but around "dandelion networks" where you belong to the network of whatever river you live in the drainage basin for. Within that network everyone has a voice – all humans, but also their communication technology is set up to provide voices for the natural environment as well, so that any decisions properly take into account the needs of the ecosystems around them. The dandelion networks are closely entwined with their local environment and feel a great deal of pride for the way they're managing to turn things around and make human life on earth sustainable long-term. However, not everyone is part of a dandelion network; there's still some nation-states hanging on to existence, though with much less control, and also corporations have been stripped of their power but are not gone and have become basically their own little nation-states as well.
In this context, an alien ship arrives, landing in the Chesapeake network, who want to save all humans from what they see as an urgently dying planet! Who gets to decide who is communicating with the aliens on behalf of all humans? What will the various groups do to make sure their voice is heard? What values should direct everyone's actions in this fraught first contact? Judy, our viewpoint character, happens to be first on the scene when the aliens land, and ends up being the main liaison from the dandelion networks to the aliens as a result, but Judy and her priorities don't get to stand alone for long.
I love this set-up, and I love the themes the book is exploring. All the nature imagery, and the conscious hard work going into keeping the earth thriving as much as possible, and the history of activism that underlies all the dandelion networks' current work.
And the way that creating relationships is depicted as something requiring work and attention to grow them into something full of trust and understanding. Judy's relationship with her wife, Carol, is shown to be already strong and deep and loving and supportive, but Judy and Carol's relationship with their co-parents, Dinar and Athëo, is still new and fragile. But there's also the humans' relationships with their planet, and the dandelion networks' relationships with their local governments, and with the corporations, and with the aliens – and the aliens relationships within themselves as well. I love all of this! And the smaller-scale and larger-scale relationships are like, thematically resonant with each other in a very effective way.
But I think to talk about this book in further detail I'm going to need to go behind a spoiler cut!
Ok so first...the aliens. So there are two different species of aliens who come to earth together! These two species met each other and formed a relationship with each other a very long time ago, and have carefully worked out how to have a mutually beneficial relationship with each other. I thought this was so interesting and well done and I loved learning more about their history and culture and ways of relating to each other and variance of opinions within each group.
But also, I am eternally torn between wanting to read about truly alien aliens, and wanting aliens who can successfully communicate and form relationships with humans on a first-contact time scale. And these ones honestly just felt like humans in funny hats. The corporate humans seemed just as alien to our main characters as the actual outer-space aliens did. And like, that might have been thematically the point or something? Which is valid. But then why even bother having aliens? It felt to me too far in the direction of the way that literary fiction treats speculative fiction ideas, where the only facet of value is the metaphorical point, instead of making the speculative elements make concrete sense contextually as well.
Because I just couldn't believe in them as being aliens from another world. And you can go so much more alien than this without taking them into the realm of unrelatable, so I really wish this book had!
And like, the aliens are similar enough that Judy and Carol start dating one of the aliens. Within, if I'm remembering the timelines correctly, weeks of knowing him? And they're SO chill about it, as if it's no different than deciding to date another human. Which sure, maybe they're that kind of people, but even that isn't marked as a thing. It's as if the narrative is of the opinion that it's normal to be chill about dating cross-species. It just felt off to me.
Second...the humans! Okay so we spend most of our time with the Chesapeake watershed, and especially with Judy's family, and there's a lot that's great about this. I really enjoyed seeing this household still in the early days of learning to be family with each other, and the ways in which things are easy and the ways in which things are hard, and the ways their families of origin affect what they bring to their current relationships.
We also see some of what it's like to live in a watershed organized into a dandelion networks, and overall it's pretty good! I think a lot of the way the author constructed the dandelion networks is about trying to create what might be an imperfect but believably-better future, which is one of the things scifi is for! Allowing us to imagine what might be!
BUT. The way they are all constantly connected to and interacting with what's basically their watershed's local reddit / neighbourhood email listserv, via their brains, feels to me like it would be enormously overwhelming overload. Judy feels incomplete when she doesn't have access to the network, and it's the fundamental way dandelion networks function. How do people who can't handle that fit in?
When Judy travels to meet the corporate people in their home environment and she finds that overwhelming, she asks how people who can't handle it manage to fit in and live, and she gets an answer to that, but being part of a dandelion network is never shown to be something that someone who is raised within such a network could ever be uncomfortable with.
As well: gender. Gender functions differently amongst all the different groups in the book, both human groups and alien groups, and they all kind of feel weird about each other's genders because it's so different from their own norms. But within each group, too, we see people who are uncomfortable with their own culture's way of doing gender, and have a role or an identity that doesn't fit the expected framework. Which is all so much fun, because of course even with wildly different gender expectations there will always be the occasional weirdo who doesn't fit in!
That is to say, within each group except in the dandelion networks. I don't recall ever seeing a character who's part of a dandelion network who has any issue with the trinary gender system (he, she, and they) that you have the option of choosing between within their framework. Were there any??
These facets and some other stuff about the general tone of the book kind of make me feel like, even with the ways that the dandelion networks are shown to be imperfect, there is still an underlying attitude that of COURSE the ideals of the dandelion networks are the best ones to strive for. And like......I do agree with so much of what the dandelion networks are doing! But as soon as you try to tell me what the only "right" thing to think is, I get all curmudgeonly about it, you know?
I'm not sure whether I'm being fair to the book on this point tbh. Is the tone I feel like I'm picking up on something that's only in my head? I don't know! But this made it really hard for me to love the dandelion networks, even as I intellectually admired so much of what they were doing.
Anyway it turns out that the culture I am most fascinated by of all the cultures in this book is the corporate culture! They're still in many ways corporations, but the way they've developed internal understandings of gender and social interaction in unique ways are so interesting. Even the dandelion network folks think that within a few generations they'll just be another human culture with a bloody history rather than still being actively the corporations that nearly destroyed the earth.
We only see glimpses of corporate culture, and nearly all from the viewpoint of people who are antagonistic towards them, but I want to know more! Plus I find a number of the corporate characters fascinating. Intern Adrien who loves to play the game and is willing to put aside any morals for the sake of advancement. Brend, Adrien's sibling, who loves Adrien but struggles with normal socialization within the corporate environment, and with some of the values that the corporations maintain. Tiffany, whose relationship with Brend is the most important thing, to be ranked above all else when making decisions, and does not care about ethics for the sake of ethics even a little. They're all so fascinating!
(and like, oh hmm yeah of course two of my favourite characters are Brend and Tiffany, the weirdos who don't fit in anywhere, that does check out doesn't it)
And okay yes this was a whole enormous pile of words analysing my not entirely positive feelings towards this book, but overall I think what I want to say about it is that it's interesting and thoughtful enough to be WORTH arguing with! I enjoyed thinking about it, I enjoyed spending time with these characters, there were some moments I found genuinely touching and emotional, and I argue because me and the book are both united in caring about things. So I do recommend it! And please come argue with me about this book!
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https://bookwyrm.social/user/betty/review/924244/s/i-want-to-see-more-of-this-garden#anchor-924244
My thoughts!
But also your thoughts! I think you're right that the book very much takes Judy's position without like, situating it as a point of view? It seems to think they (The Dandelions) are, if not "right," at least rightest
I agree wrt the alienness of the aliens, although I found the, uh, armadillos more psychologically alien than the spider-monkeys. I also thought Judy and wife took more like a couple months to start dating the alien who's name I can't remember, but that's just my take based on vibes.
Also very funny to me that ROT13 gur rnegu jnf, va gur raq, fnirq ol nqqvat zber zrzoref gb gur cbylphyr? Gur cbjre bs ovt dhrre pubfra snzvyl? /ROT13 Like, I'm into it, to be clear, but it's a little on the nose.
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Honestly I had trouble keeping track of which characters were of which variety of alien, so the way the tree-people and plains-people were characterized differently was not at all obvious to me! They all kind of blurred together, other than Rhamnetin and the leader of the delegation and her two kids.
And you are SO right about what you say in your ROT13 and it IS so funny! Neenatrq zneevntr orgjrra xvatqbzf gb znxr crnpr, ohg znxr vg rkgerzryl cbyl!
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I think you're right that Emrys adopts the pose that the dandelion networks are utopian, or at least to use LeGuin's term, ambiguously utopian, but I certainly think it's a thing you can argue with both within the terms of the story and without. My own review quibbled a bunch with the plausibility of the technological assumptions of the utopia, I'm not quite clear on how you can have this kind of high tech-driven society without industrialization. But if I handwave that I can move on to what's really good about the book. Also I think at some level the corporate society is a concession to that, there's a basic awareness that the only reason the dandelion networks exist is because they outsource some of their ethical quandaries to the corporations, and I think that awareness is one of the things that makes compromise with the aliens possible but also emotionally difficult.
I am so unsurprised that Brend and Tiffany were your favorite characters. :D I have to admit I heard Emrys talking about the book on a podcast before I read it and she talked about having invented this society with six pronouns and complicated fashion rules for each and I was not expecting that to be a highly modern corporate society, I was imagining like a LeGuinian tribal society out of one of the Hainish novels. It was a really interesting twist but I think it does make sense, and I also enjoyed seeing how Brend navigated the edges of that.
My sense is that the aliens being basically people is the book's thesis, the whole idea is that everyone is just people and sort of theoretically, that no matter what circumstances shape people there's an inherent baseline of having physical needs and emotional needs and those needs can never stray too far from certain bounds. I dunno, I was fine with it but I can understand wanting more alien aliens.
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Oh wow, that would require some suspension of disbelief for me too!
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