I enjoyed this, though it was frustrating at times. The world-building is pretty interesting, but also a bit hand-wavy, and it seemed weird that the aliens’ cultures were easier to understand than the corporate humans. It was also annoying that the MC was so very entrenched in her tech and gender signifiers that she seemed unable to do much without them—I think it’s probably a realistic take, but I found it odd there was no mention or consideration of people off the grid, and that she was so insulated in her small region.

Overall, it’s one of the more interesting takes on a first contact story that I’ve read, and I recommend it if you like speculative or science fiction. Definitely more creative alien culture(s) than I’ve read in awhile.

While I was not in the mood at the time of reading, I did appreciate the concept of the story and the outcome of it. It's definitely a great edition to queer speculative science fiction.

This book is so well done. I did not know I needed a hopeful dystopian until I picked up this book. It was nice to read a post-apocalyptic novel that reminded me that people have survived apocalypses before and made me think we could survive it again. This was a very interesting take on a first contact story. There's a fantastic plot arc about our main character and her wife navigating a new co-parenting situation in their new polycule that parallels a lot of the conversations happening between the humans and the aliens. Beautiful bit of plot mirroring there. I also really appreciated our main character's relationship with religion.

Trigger warning for attempted kidnapping.

I'm sorry to say I wasn't able to get into this one. I've tried revisiting this at different times with different moods and it just wasn't for me. I've heard such great things about this from other reviewers so I will recommend for others.

Wow! Ok there's so much to love about this story. The 'first contact' aspect was so brilliantly done, the aliens came across as so unique and I really enjoyed learning about them and all the different ways they differ from humans. I felt like we got such a deep dive into their culture, which is so rare, and, although it did slow the book down in parts, I loved learning about them.

It's a complex story, juggling a lot of different elements, but it does so effortlessly. I especially enjoyed the 'family' aspects. The drama played a slightly larger part than I was expecting, but the ideas of parenthood and identity were so well developed and added an extra depth to the story. I also enjoyed the look at climate change and the authors vision of our future world.

Definitely one to read it you like complex stories that don't always end up the way you imagine!

I loved this book so much. We get so many stories of humanity in the future setting out for the stars, but rarely do we get books like this where a large part of humanity actually wants to stay on Earth. The dandelion networks are such a lovely and wholesome way of imagining a potential future where we take care of our planet and can continue to live here even after catastrophic climate change. I also really enjoyed the first contact part of this story. The aliens were very imaginative, and the ways the main characters and the aliens interacted and worked together was so refreshing, to get communication-based interactions rather than violence-based ones. Highly recommend picking this up if you need some hope for how we can continue to live on our planet.

A uniquely heartwarming and prophetic take on eco scifi. This was one that I immediately purchased for my home collection on release

Hopeful systems-forward SF in the 70s Le-Guin-ian vein. Emrys has put forward a fascinating take on first contact, one that dispenses with the intrigue and machinations that often come with such stories in favor of human contemplation and conversation -- a future where networks and communities are the mode of the day and where contact with alien lifeforms provokes cautious but excited gatherings as opposed to... well, whatever one might expect if it were to happen today.
The novel wades pretty far into the weeds of the systems and logistical stuff, enough so that it might push away more plot or even character-focused readers -- but in an age when systems are increasingly important to contemplate in our lives and our fiction, Emrys has made a bold entry into that re-burgeoning canon.

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys has solarpunk, hopepunk, and friendly aliens who nevertheless have a different perspective on saving your planet versus leaving it behind. I was extremely pleased to find the book is in conversation with Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. There are references to Star Trek as a human reference point for first contact, and at one point Emrys quoted the Butler's Parable books in the most perfect place imaginable. As a whole, this novel's embrace of possibility feels like a love letter to human stories about space and the future: science fiction at its best.

The first-person narrator of this novel lives in the Anacostia Watershed, in what we'd call Maryland. The Watershed areas are their own political entities, separate from the nation states that surround them and from corporations, which are walled off enclaves, such as the "aisland" of Zealand near Australia. Using extensive environmental sensors and collective discussion via their own internet-like communications network, the Watershed people have been slowly and steadily improving the effects of climate change, with a long-term view. Their Dandelion Network relies not only on crowdsourcing, but algorithms that can give more weight to expert opinions and sensor readings. They are usually but not always at odds with the nation states, and mostly at odds with the corporations, whose pursuit of profit created and supported environmental effects that brought humanity to the brink of extinction. As you might imagine, there's tension there!

When aliens arrive in the Anacostia Watershed, all three aspects of human society need to work together to decide what to do, despite their competing wants, needs, and desires. And then the network on which the Watershed people rely, with its weighted algorithms related to the community's moral principles, becomes unstable and untrustworthy, making everything a thousand times more difficult. Intersectionality and coalition-building among people with diverse viewpoints are integral parts of the novel. The narrator, Judy Wallach-Stevens, is a Jewish woman from a family of activists; she and her wife are parents and a co-parents with another couple. There are trans characters, a character with a prosthetic arm, an assortment of genders, and a character with autism who's part of a larger community of Corporate "techies," who have found a way around the very complex gender presentation games played by Corporate society. Judy's Jewishness and that of some of her family infuses the narrative, especially resonating with the alien social role of Questioner.

This is a book about negotiation and arguing and discussing; about making mistakes; and about trusting each other afterwards and finding ways to come back together, on both the political and familial levels. Flawed human beings, anxious and sleep-deprived, must nonetheless make important decisions, using their brains instead of their base instincts to "look for the big ape." It's a look at how what we share can be just as important as what we can offer each other, and how opposite sides can come to terms that provide benefit to all. It's a wonderfully complex book and will, I think, reward re-reading and discussion a thousand-fold. Highly recommended.

Judy Wallach-Stevens is alerted to potential pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay, but what she discovers is far more unexpected. She encounters aliens who have traveled across the galaxy to save humanity, believing that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. However, not everyone is ready to abandon Earth. Decades ago, watershed networks banished the last corporations to artificial islands to escape the control of nation-states and work towards a sustainable future. Now, they must compete with corporations and nation-states to represent humanity to the alien visitors. If any one group accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone's attention on the skies, Judy must work to create understanding between her own species and the powerful newcomers, and ensure the survival of Earth. The fate of the planet rests on her success.

I can absolutely see why some people didn't enjoy A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. It's longer than it really needs to be and it focuses more on character development and interaction than moving the plot forward at a swift pace. Even so, I enjoyed this one! I like stories about different life forms getting to know each other, exploring their similarities and differences. I think the vibes of A Half-Built Garden are somewhat similar to The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet in that way, but A Half-Built Garden is a first contact story and the stakes are much higher. I can't say if I would've grown bored with A Half-Built Garden if I'd read a physical copy, but I can say that the audiobook was done well and kept me engaged and intrigued by the story and its characters even when the plot was dragging a bit. If you're interested in a queer first contact story that's character-driven, you might enjoy A Half-Built Garden too!

I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was suggested for the 2023 list. It was not nominated for the award. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2023/01/2023-reading-list-announced-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

This book was really interesting! I was intrigued by the storyline and that's what initially drew me to this title. I also really love the cover artwork.

A Half-Build Garden is reminiscent of classic science fiction novels with imaginative and harrowing first encounters of the otherworldly kind. Simply put: I loved it.

I received an ARC of A Half-Built Garden from Macmillan-Tor/Forge in exchange for an honest review.

Get this premise: in the 2080s, humanity has gotten itself somewhat back on track in regard to climate change and has begun to build a better world. Then aliens show up, and, believing that humans cannot be entrusted with taking care of Earth, insist on rescuing our species and taking us through space to a more suitable habitat. Sold! But A Half-Built Garden works better in theory than in execution, and I found myself struggling to stay invested in this story that’s dense with names but not with developed or multi-dimensional characters, or physical descriptions, or plot—all of which left me in what felt like the literary equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank, scrambling for purchase, searching for something, anything I could hold on to. Unfortunately, I never found it.

Judy Wallach-Stevens makes first contact, and she and her family function as ground zero for the relationship between humans and aliens. To say that everything goes down quite quickly would be a wild understatement. A Half-Built Garden takes place over weeks, maybe months, and the events of the book simply don’t make sense on that timeline. Within days, humans and aliens are having, let’s say…intimate relationships, and I don’t buy it. These are not humanoid aliens. On a longer timeline—filed under “years, hundreds of”—sure, you could convince me. But not days.

There are so many characters in this book, and in turn, so many names. I couldn’t remember who was who when the paucity of physical descriptions left me without much in the way of concrete characteristics I could envision. The prose felt like ice, and I kept slipping off it. Ditto character development. The story skips right past all the big questions raised by this particular first contact scenario, and it gets so tangled up in the small questions (such a gender identity/pronoun usage, which are inherently interesting but just not relevant on this timeline) that I couldn’t trace the arc of any character. Did they have arcs? Was there a plot? I truly do not know.

I have a lot of respect for this kind of fiction. I would like to live in a world where we have books that are annoyingly, relentlessly optimistic—books about how we communicate, find connection, establish intimacy, and figure out what is best for ourselves and those we love. But such books, in my experience, do not resonate if the relationships they portray feel artificial and inauthentic, which is the case in A Half-Built Garden. If Emrys had bumped this story further into the future, at least several hundred years after first contact, the human-alien dynamics might have made more sense to me. As it stands, the timeline is too rapid: things accelerate too quickly, and I was left in the cold, waiting with diminishing and ultimately futile hope for rescue while Emrys left me behind.

It has been FAR too long since I've been able to dive into a science fiction novel (in truth, it's been a few weeks – at most). That made me excited for my next slotted read, A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys.

We've seen several takes on the first alien encounter. Yet none will be more harrowing than A Half-Built Garden.

One morning Judy Wallach woke up to a painfully normal alarm – the one alerting her of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. However, it won't be pollution waiting for her – but aliens. Aliens who seem to think that humanity needs to be saved from itself.

“On Earth, people like her had never given in—only died and made way for those more willing to listen,”

I felt like I was sold on A Half-Built Garden right from the start. The irony of a pollution alarm alerting us to aliens? That is such a human thing to do, much as I hate to say it. So it was easy to picture and easier to want to read everything that followed.

One of the many reasons I enjoyed A Half-Built Garden is that it didn't get bogged down by human expectations of what defines 'alien.' What I'm trying to say is that the aliens were precisely that – alien. They weren't humanoid by nature, but rather something other.

I would have enjoyed more time with aliens and the topics they opened up. Instead, this novel splits its focus into two things. The first should be obvious by now. The other half is a family drama. That isn't inherently bad (far from it!), but it felt top-heavy and kept pushing me out of my reading zone.

I do love how thoughtful A Half-Built Garden is. I wish more novels had so much thought wrapped into their development. Perhaps I'm just saying that because I really appreciated the story's commentary.

Two symbiotic alien species, the Ringers, arrive on Earth with a warning to humans: Humanity's technological advancement spells destruction for the planet and threatens the human species with extinction. It's a process the Ringers have seen multiple times, and only this once have they arrived in time before catastrophe and destruction. Humans should leave the planet, join the aliens in a symbiotic relationship, and live in space habitats with endless resources mined from the solar system.

Except the Ringers make first contact with humans from the watershed networks, committed to fighting climate change and healing the planet. And these humans say, why would we abandon our home, when we are just now making a difference in saving it? But other human societies, like the corporations and nation-states, may have a very different agenda.

Will the Ringers force humans to leave their planet and disassemble it for parts, or will they enter into a mutually beneficial agreement that preserves what some humans care the most for?

Having heard Emrys describe this book as "diaperpunk", in the vein of "hopepunk", I certainly see that description. This is punk, in terms of scrappy and from the ground up. And hope, in terms of ecological and environmental outlooks, evolving societal responses to issues like gender identities, non-heteronormative relationships, and so on... And it's totally "diaperpunk" because babies, nursing, changing diapers, and playdates are actually essential to the action, relationships, and political agenda!

The technology is also incredibly interesting. I'm fascinated by the idea of the dandelion networks and the watershed community organization that's focused on crowdsourcing, extreme community collaboration and brainstorming, and the analyzing the environmental impact of *every* decision. Key decisions are made due to erratic storm seasons, and fraught plot action is complicated by a hurricane.

This story presents a way for local political action to be deeply aligned with and concerned with environmental action, and to harness technology, communication, and at-your-fingertips data in a way that certainly makes sense but seems just quite out of the reach of our current capabilities. In many scenes, I genuinely wondered - is this change possible? Could we really hope for this? Or would human nature, greedy politics, and rampant capitalism continually crush the waves of changes needed to bring this to life?

There's a lot to love about this story. It reminded me strongly of elements in Emma Newman's Planetfall series (perhaps in the way technology is used by the characters?), but with a more hopeful tone. And I appreciated the questions being asked by the characters: What can we all do to succeed, and to preserve what is important to all of us? Whether that's a home, a culture, a food, a religion. What makes us *us*, and how do we remain ourselves while also acknowledging adaptation may be necessary?

A Half-Built Garden is a timely novel where, in the not so distant future, humanity first comes into contact with aliens. It’s been years since Earth was finally able to somewhat bring themselves back from near extinction due to climate change. The Dandelion Networks are grassroots programs around the world that have worked hard to bring the Earth back to homeostasis. It’s not perfect, but the harder they work, the better the Earth will get.

The aliens have come to save humanity. Judy, who works at the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, believes Earth is capable of sustaining humanity. This leads to an adventure combining two very different cultures in order to come to an understanding—Earth doesn’t need saving, because it’s already saved.

I can’t stress how important this novel is. It is bleak, I won’t lie, but it is also tinged with hope. The Dandelion Network was considered the rebels. The corporations still exist, but TDN realized they didn’t need their help, and worked on their own to save Earth. This is important. Corporations are more than willing to throw their home away for money, but there are plenty of people left behind who want to save the only planet they’ve ever known.

From my understanding, this isn’t a series. The novel ended in a way that was both an end, and left it open for a possible sequel or spin off. I’d love to see more from this world. There was so much to it, and there are so many avenues that can be explored in the future.

Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for the chance to read this advanced review copy. All opinions are my own.

CW for colonization, transphobia, religious bigotry, and suicidal thoughts

It’s probably more of a high 3.5.

This is another of those arcs of mine which got put on the back burner because I couldn’t focus and could only manage to get to it now coz I got my hands on the audiobook, which was very helpful and I finished listening the whole thing in less than 4 days. But now trying to review it isn’t an easy task.

I’m unsure how to categorize this one in ways I understand. It has many characters who have varying motivations and values and methods of dealing with issues, but we also only get one POV which doesn’t lend itself to too much character development. There is exploring of relationships - motherhood and in general, child rearing playing a very important part of this book - and we see how new bonds are made between people of various species with varied interests, and how this affects the overall fate of the people and the planet/habitat.

But it’s also not a completely plot focused novel. It’s a very simple plot point if we think about it - aliens are here who think earth will not survive and want to take all of humanity onto their space habitats (maybe by force) and it’s the turn of various communities on earth who have been working tirelessly to reverse the effects of climate change, to convince them otherwise. How this happens is the plot. But the way the author goes about it involves contemplation, arguments, discussions, consensus building and not any big action set pieces that we would expect from these kind of futuristic novels.

Ultimately what remains in our memory after finishing the book is all the concepts that are explored here. There are watershed communities that have been formed around large sustaining rivers who have worked incessantly to bring more ecological balance and reverse the drastic effects of climate change. The technology they use combined with their negotiation methods and how they build consensus to solve methods feels like something to aspire to if we ever want to actually solve problems which are plaguing our world today. We also see corporations and how they’ve created their own world within the world, but I don’t think we got a clearly sense of how their hierarchy and structure works. Their way of treating everything like a game wasn’t something I understood entirely, but I did understand the resentments some of the people living in those lands had against the watersheds. The watersheds ofcourse have their own grievances with the corporations which destroyed the world for their greed. But the author also does an interesting job of giving us mostly clear cut notions of who is ultimately responsible for how close the earth came to collapse, but also the fact that playing a blame game decades later doesn’t help anyone and it’s more necessary to work together.

This idea of consensus building is greatly put to the test when our main protagonist and her family have to argue their case in front of the aliens for wanting to stay on earth, confident that the work they’ve put into is helping restore balance to the planet and more can be done with the help of the Ringer’s high tech. The author illustrates the importance of trying to understand each other view points, the necessity of negotiating with even those people who’ve tried to harm you, and how understanding each other’s motivations and goals and helping each other in bettering everyone is the only way to resolve conflict without violence.

Ultimately, I felt it was an admirable attempt at creating a hopeful story of building families and communities which will all work together to avert disasters. Its nicely aided by an eccentric cast of characters - both humans and aliens and their respective delightful children - and lots of intense negotiations and conversations. But while I hope that humanity is capable of being this community oriented, the cynic in me thinks it’s unrealistically hopeful and that optimism of it all just made me sad, coz it felt impossible. However, I’m very eager to see what more interesting concepts the author comes up with next in her books.