I haven't read many (or maybe any?) first encounter books, so I was very excited to receive the eARC of A Half-Built Garden, especially with such a gorgeous cover.

" That night I paced the Chesapeake threads: useless habit, given my current expertise ratings, even if the algorithms had been doing their jobs. But I still wanted that kinesthetic sense of the watershed as a whole. It felt like a hike or a prayer, but deeper: knowing in my brain and belly and bones the rivers flowing silty with stormwater, every particle that washed from land into ocean, the health of the air that filled our lungs and the seagrass that held the bay in place. I wanted to work with the planet, to understand everything she told me. My mesh picked up on those desires, or my trend toward holistic processing, and shifted from text and numbers to graphics and textures, impressionist topography that felt more detailed than the details."

The technology here is more than believable - being constantly hooked into a community-style social media that reads information about your surroundings, allowing people to comment in real-time sounds both incredible and terrifying. The part that's not explained well is how everyone is reading and commenting and making notes and sharing, all while still interacting with people in real life - there must be so many pauses and stopping and starting conversations. The connection in person would be so difficult. Although I guess you're connecting in real life while you're connecting via the network, so it's all meta and complicated and slightly distanced. This could explain the large communities/families to allow for deeper connections. I find it hard to believe that while this is the future, it's still the near future, and I doubt humans have evolved to be better at multitasking in such a short period of time.

"It had been the same with Carol: first seeking out the conversations, longer and more often, and then discovering that I'd made a place in my head to model her body, imagining more and more detail until I wanted desperately to replace imagination with observation. With touch. It had made me shy and slow then, and did the same now."

I am all for polyamorous relationships. Sexuality is fluid, and it takes a village to raise a child, and everything here makes me so happy, but I'm sorry - jumping into a sexual encounter with an alien that is described (at first) as a giant spider does not. make. sense. One step too far for me, Emrys. Maybe two.

Judy's tendency to be so in her own head forced a disconnect with me. I could only read so much before it triggered my own anxiety, and I needed a break. Overthinking everything is exhausting, even if it's secondhand. I appreciated her ability to step out of the moment and drill down to innate goals and values, but that seems so foreign to me and the world I know that it affected the believability of the narrative. If I ever attend extensive therapy, I might be able to reread A Half-Built Garden to truly get everything out of this story.

A Half-Built Garden was operating at a higher level than I was while reading it. As a thought experiment on the future (dealing with climate change, holding corporations responsible, treating others with dignity and respect and living in true communities) and on first encounters, I would highly recommend this book. A Half-Built Garden is beautifully and thoughtfully written with true skill and artistry; I just struggled to connect to the narrative.

"We should tell them that no matter what you do to us, we survive. And we remember who we are."

First, I’d like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this book. I am leaving this honest review of my own will.

Just couldn’t get into this one. Had to put it down.

I was first drawn to this book because of the title, I am an amateur gardener, and I love a good gardening-as-metaphor. I also enjoy SciFi that deals with First Contact, and the ethical ecology and environmental concerns were a plus too, so I dove in quickly. The first half was a lot of getting used to the procedure and politics the communities in the story rely on, so I moved a little slow initially. Once into the meat of the story, it moved along well, and I was pulled in for the entire second half!

Emrys starts us off in a post-catastrophic-climate-change earth, where the majority of humanity is working to heal the earth, protect essential ecology and live in harmony with it. Family structures and understanding of gender have also evolved in refreshing ways, and there's just a lot of simple contentment and hope in these parts of the book. The plot begins when an alien ship lands near a community with a mission to save humanity from the dying earth before it's too late. The interspecies interactions and negotiations are at times thoughtful and interesting, and at times fraught with misunderstanding. The challenges of trying to choose a few people to negotiate on behalf of all of humanity were realistic - and as you can imagine there is definitely conflict in there to make for some good frictional fiction.

I enjoyed how events played out as a story, and I've also found myself talking about the concept of this book to several different friends as climate change has been more on our minds this summer with some very extreme events happening around the world. While this book is of course fictional, it feels relevant in the way that good SciFi can. I would definitely recommend giving it a read!

Afronto esta reseña con sentimientos encontrados, porque aunque las idea que aparecen expresadas en esta novela corta me parecen interesantísimas y muy relevantes y el escenario de primer contacto en un mundo que se está recuperando lentamente del desastre climático no puede ser más atractivo, existe un cierto aire de inocencia en la ejecución que no me ha terminado de convencer.


La Tierra deja atrás las peores consecuencias del cambio climático principalmente debido al trabajo de las comunidades formadas entorno a los ríos más importantes, haciendo hincapié en el equilibrio de la naturaleza y el buen uso de los recursos naturales. No obstante, aún existen tanto los restos de las antiguas naciones como de las multinacionales reconvertidas, por lo que el equilibrio es cuando menos inestable, cuando no directamente requiere un ejercicio de voluntad de creencia por parte del lector.

En este escenario, se produce un primer contacto con unas razas alienígenas que viven en simbiosis y que ofrecen como única alternativa razonable para la humanidad dejar atrás su planeta madre, como ellas mismas tuvieron que hacer en su momento. Para allanar y mucho este primer encuentro, Ruthanna Emrys hace que los extraterrestres ya conozcan el idioma gracias a las emisiones que han ido recibiendo antes de desplazarse aquí. También quiere la casualidad que el primer encuentro tenga lugar con una pareja humana que lleva a su bebé lactante, lo que hace que se coloquen en la misma posición que los aliens que también llevan a sus retoños a las negociaciones.

A partir de aquí se entabla una relación complicada de negociaciones por parte de ambas facciones, así como de los otros poderes fácticos de la Tierra para tomar una decisión sobre el destino de la humanidad, bien sea permanecer en la Tierra intentando salvarla, bien sea dejar atrás la cuna para dar el siguiente paso en la evolución de la especie.

El lenguaje que utiliza la historia no es especialmente fácil y en ocasiones la lectura se ve entorpecida por esto, en especial porque el uso de algunos pronombres que yo al menos no conocía hasta ahora, provocada por una de las culturas de la Tierra que cambien de pronombre como el que cambia de traje (literalmente). Pero mi principal queja respecto al libro es la facilidad con la que soslayan algunos temas que parecen de importancia capital y la necesaria buena voluntad por parte de todas las partes para seguir negociando a pesar de las muchísimas trabas e impedimentos que existen. Es un mensaje de optimismo maravilloso, pero que quizá requiere demasiada colaboración por parte de un lector que como yo, tenga menos esperanza en nuestra capacidad empática con seres de otros planetas, cuando ni siquiera somos capaces de ejercer esta empatía con el vecino de al lado.

En resumen, A Half-Built Garden, es una novela con una especulación muy interesante, pero a la que quizá le hubiera venido mejor algo más de pragmatismo a la hora de exponer su desarrollo y conclusiones.

This book does an amazing exploration of themes that I would hope for in a first encounter style story that I feel is rather lacking. The press to the future where we can explore the extremes of our current society while also putting them against how we may shy away from what we have grown to to ameliorate someone new coming to us was an amazing touchstone that has stuck with me since the conversation in the story about 'Native Americans acting more white and see where that got them' . This book is cozy and humble while also bringing brilliant and important conversations to the forefront with an amazing future aesthetic that I'm not sure I can properly place. Political thriller? Yes, Dystopian? Well kind of, but only through the actions we already see today, in some aspects it brings that glean of hope for what we as a species can become socially. A MUST READ for sci fi and the exploration of the self while dealing with aliens in such an interesting way.

An alien contact human story was what drew me to this book to request to review. I got something a lot more and while I did not love it at all I think there is a lot for others to discover here.

I think the whole concept of this future Earth is rather interesting. Basically Earth has fallen ecosystem and corporalism wise. There are big watershed networks all over the planet that are working hard on trying to recover our eco system while making decisions as a whole without one person as the leader. The corporates were pushed away by them and they settled on what was previous new zeeland/austriala I believe. The family dynamics are also very different. Couples take on children and form families with other couples so that there is more of a network for each other and the children. This can be romantic/sexual as well but doesn't have to be. A lot is open about queer identity but even here there seems to still be a stigma on being trans.

As much as I liked exploring that part of this book I felt that we were thrown into this story without very little explanation. I was grasping at straws while we were also meeting the aliens and I am fairly certain I didn't manage to catch all the great things about this set up. I think that was a shame. A bit more of a focus on the world building, like the explanation of the actual collapse and war with the corporations would have been nice.

Adding into that I am sorry to say is that I did not care for the element of romance in this. It wasn't about it being three persons but about one of them being a headless spider having sex with an f/f couple wih its tentacles/paws/whatever. Like no, okay. I didn't need it to be that graphic either.

A Half-Built Garden is an intelligent and compelling SF first contact near-future novel by Ruthanna Emrys. Released 26th July 2022 by Macmillan on their Tor Forge imprint, it's 352 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately.

This is a beautifully written story, slow moving, with gravitas. I was engaged quite literally from the first page. Alien first contact stories are a favorite and this is a good one. It's set in 2083 and humans have finally banded together (more or less) to banish the corporations to isolated outposts and are in a desperate race to save Earth and maintain habitability. The aliens show up to convince what's left of humanity to abandon Earth before a catastrophe renders it a lost cause.

The first person protagonist/narrator is sympathetically written, intelligent, queer, compassionate, and three dimensional. There's a lot of content in the book extrapolating out from corporate oligarchy, corruption, greed, and the nature of power and the effect that has on our climate and habitat. At the same time, it's very much a story about parenthood and identity and the fact that diapers have to be changed and babies insist on being fed even if you're just a few minutes from first contact with alien lifeforms. Some of the mentions of parenting moments gave a whiff of whimsy, some of them, I felt, broke up the narrative thread a bit and yanked me out of my suspension of disbelief.

There is a very human story here, wrapped in a breathtakingly creative world building which made me pause at several points in amazement. Ms. Emrys is a gifted storyteller and this is a well written story.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

A Half-Built Garden is a first contact novel that poses many thought provoking questions. At the beginning of the story, humans had just barely managed to survive the sixth mass extinction caused by climate change. They receive a visit from The Ringers, a coalition of different alien species who had successfully escaped their own planetary extinctions. The Ringers, who are far more advanced than the humans, invite them to join The Rings and leave Earth. Will human accept that invitation or remain on Earth and continue their effort to save the planet?

It is a well written novel and I enjoyed reading it. It's a great novel for a book club because there are plenty of things to discuss.

A Half-Built Garden is a quiet, thoughtful, smart sci-fi novel that blends climate fiction with a first contact story. Set in 2083, it follows a queer Jewish woman living in climate-conscious community on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. One night she goes for a walk with her infant daughter and ends up being the first person to encounter alien species that have landed on the Earth, wanting humans to abandon the planet and join them in space before a climate apocalypse destroys everything.

This is such an interesting book. It's very much a slow-burn and character focused, but with such deep world-building and thought given to alien culture, biology, habitat, families, mating, childrearing, spirituality etc. And the same level of attention to detail given to both sustainable human communities of the future, and what the descendants of corporations with their own culture and goals might look like. The book does a lot to explore ideas of gender and gender identity, disability, and family structures. (The main character lives within a polyamorous family structure).

Philosophically, it's considering a lot about decision-making, power, living symbiotically, and sustainability. It's an impressive book and I can see why it's being compared to LeGuin. Readers who are looking for a lot of action or a fast-paced plot are not going to find it here, but it's a beautiful and thought-provoking book worth the time to read. I received an advance copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

I requested this book from Netgalley based on the recommendation of Seanan McGuire, one of my favorite authors who often recommends books on Twitter that I end up liking. It’s billed as a new take on a first contact story, which I was really in the mood for - I feel like I’m reading a lot more fantasy lately and not enough science fiction. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy fantasy, I do! But science fiction is where my heart lies, and between Hugo reading and other stuff, I realized I’m reading a lot more fantasy than science fiction and I miss spaceships and robots. A Half-Built Garden doesn’t have any robots, it it has some cool spaceships in it so that’s a win!

But seriously- the main conceit in the book is that a near-future Earth is just barely climbing it’s way out of a climate crisis, and traditional governments and corporations don’t hold the same kind of sway they used to - at least not everywhere. Instead there are a number of environmental reclamation zones that are self-governed by a mixture of leading edge science and Reddit-style consensus. The Earth stuff alone is fascinating and well-written and I could’ve devoured another 200 pages of backstory here. But into this world lands an alien ship making contact - these aliens destroyed their world and live on a ringworld and are seeking out other life forms to rescue them from what they believe is the inevitable doom of a planetary existence. The rub is that humanity is divided - the corporations are ready to jump ship and strip mine a whole new solar system, while the protagonists want to have a chance to actually finish fixing the earth and don’t want to be forced to leave.

This was a truly wonderful book. I even enjoyed the parts I didn’t like - for example, I found the multiparty-marriage setup of the protagonists to be off putting and unpleasant- mainly because the narrator and her primary wife seemed to have rushed into it and it didn’t feel like a fully realized, vibrant relationship. I also felt like the corporate presentation veered towards caricature on occasions. But overall the story felt honest and loving and kind and just what I wonted. It was also nice to see a Jewish protagonist that actually felt Jewish. Representation matters, and I always like to feel like there is a place for me in this genre.

Thanks to Tor and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Read primarily from my physical ARC

I absolutely loved the first contact aspect of this novel. The aliens were so wonderfully "other" and I enjoyed learning how they differed from humans, both biologically and culturally. If this had remained a larger aspect of the story, this easily could have been a four star read.

Gender identity is a very big aspect of this story. I appreciate the importance of representation in stories but I found that these discussions frequently halted the narrative, quickly feeling very repetitive.

I did not expect this story to be such a family drama. So much of the story revolved around the protagonist's child and coparents. There were so many mentions of nursing. Since many. Then during the climax of the story, the characters are looking for diapers. I know that others mothers look for representation in fiction, but not me. Or at least not these aspects of motherhood.

If you are looking for a soft scifi novel surrounding topics of parenthood and gender identity, then you may find more in this novel.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review.

HIGHLIGHTS
~aliens that absolutely do not look like spiders
~corporations stuck in cages
~optimistic environmental sci-fi
~never underestimate a dandelion
~can we have this future??? please???

I have been staring blankly at my screen for over a week now, every time I sit down to try and talk about this book. It. It’s just. I have no idea how to be coherent about it. It’s brilliant and beautiful and breathlessly compelling, thoughtful and hopeful and wildly imaginative, revolutionary in so many ways. Reading it feels like the galaxy-brain meme; you can feel your mind expanding as all these new ideas and concepts come rushing in, redefining things you took for granted, making you really look at your own core beliefs, challenging precepts you thought were foundational.

Judy lives in a future in which climate collapse was just barely averted; a future in which people align themselves with watersheds rather than nations – instead of arbitrary lines drawn on a map, you belong to the eco-system you’re a part of. It’s a huge shift from how most of us think of ourselves today, but it’s also incredibly simple; the kind of thing that feels so obvious and correct once someone suggests it or points it out. Once I’d grasped the idea, I immediately wondered how is this not something we do already? It makes so much sense!

The watersheds honestly look pretty utopic from where I’m sitting, and that is in huge part due to the algorithms that govern their private network: ones that balance and moderate discussion, giving greater weight to people whose history and specialities are relevant, ‘downvoting’ those who don’t know what they’re talking about, collating information from different places and marking or even removing unsubstantiated facts and opinions. I mean. !!! Imagine if we had those now! Just the idea of them were enough to bring me to tears, but also seeing how they allow consensus to form, how everyone gets to weigh in on every decision made by the whole…gods. This. This. And how community grows out of this, the natural effect it has on those who live by it; there are no presidents or prime ministers, because they’re not needed. There’s no parliament, because everyone gets a say. When for whatever reason a spokesperson is needed, the watersheds send someone who specialises in the thing – but that person is still plugged into the network, and can convey the voice of their entire community. They’re not representing the group, they’re an avatar of the group, and that’s just. Mindblowing.

Which is one reason Judy is so uncomfortable when she becomes the de-facto representative of the watersheds – not just her own, but all of them! – to the aliens. Especially since it happens by accident. But the real problem is that due to her situation, she has to make decisions on her own, and try her best to figure out the right questions to ask, when typically she would be directed by the concensus of her whole community. From a reader’s perspective, this makes her incredibly interesting – someone who could usually expect to be somewhat passive in a task like this has to be active, even proactive instead, and we get to see how difficult that is for her, and the problems it causes for herself and those around her.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s surrounded by a marvelous cast: her wife Carol, and the co-parents who are the other half of their household, Dinar and Athëo, all of whom have very different backgrounds, interests, and specialisations, but all of whom come together as a non-traditional family that I really loved. (Speaking of which, I was delighted to see a future sci-fi with Judaism front-and-centre – there’s a Passover Seder that’s not just wonderful to read, but immensely plot-relevant!)

And of course, there’s the aliens themselves, primarily Cystosine, the First Mother of the vanguard ship, and Rhamnetin, whose job is to ask awkward questions. The premise of aliens who want to save humanity by removing them from Earth is an idea I’ve never seen before; I loved it for being such an original take, and for how easy it was to follow the aliens’ reasoning (even if I didn’t agree with it any more than Judy did). I thought Emrys did an excellent job straddling the line between making her aliens incomprehensibly Other and having them be recognisable as people, and although I’m always eager for more worldbuilding, I think she made the right call not to overwhelm us with all the intricacies of alien culture. We get more than enough to make our eyebrows shoot up and our jaws drop, but not so much that it distracts from the story – pretty much everything we learn about them is directly plot-relevant.

Honestly, I could type for weeks, and I still wouldn’t come close to doing this book justice. A Half-Built Garden is something really special, and painfully timely. Reading it was a joy, but it also hurt, because it’s so full of hope and I want that so badly. For me, this was much less a book about first-contact than it was about humans who have embraced the planet that made us; who are dedicated to being, and doing, better than previous generations; who are united in their passion to heal and protect and celebrate. It’s riveting, captivating, gloriously strange and unique and thought-provoking. I couldn’t put it down and never once wanted to.

A Half-Built Garden is literally flawless. There’s not one thing about it that isn’t polished to perfection. The prose gleams, the characters breathe, the story runs like a river. The worldbuilding is a gorgeous mosaic, every piece fitting together perfectly to create, not just a future I can believe in, but one I want to live in.

This is not one of the best books of the year; it’s one of the best books of the decade. Don’t miss it.

I really enjoyed seeing the concept of motherhood and cultural exchange that happened between two species. Thank you for an advanced copy. I will definitely be recommending this to my partner.

I have previously known Ruthanna Emrys for her revisionist Lovecraft fiction series, which sees the ‘fish people’ of The Shadow Over Innsmouth as a persecuted minority, and tries to imagine life from their point of view. (I also saw an interview with Emrys, in which she pointed out that her own grandparents, Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe who came to Brooklyn in the 1920s, were precisely the people about whom Lovecraft expressed his racist revulsion. I immediately identified with her comment, since my maternal grandparents were Jews who emigrated to Brooklyn in the 1920s as well).

A Half-Built Garden is quite different from Emrys’ previous work. It is a semi-utopian first contact novel. (She also describes it in the concluding acknowledgements, somewhat humorously, as ‘diaperpunk’.)

We are in the late 21st century. The Earth has undergone a big reorganization, for the better. Though nation-states and large corporations both still exist, they have been displaced from much of the Earth’s land surface by “watershed networks,” ecological communities that are more or less anarchist and communal in organization, each of which is responsible for the watershed in which they live, and which have succeeded — over the past half century, since the mostly nonviolent revolution that allowed them to be set up — in slowing down, and even to a certain extent reversing, the ecological damage that had been done to the planet by the two previous centuries of unbridled capitalism.

The watersheds are characterized by a mesh of extended families, tied together by nonhierarchical computer networks using automated (computerized) comment moderation, designed to maximize democratic discussion, and weighted according to the core values of the communities: shared resources, volunteer work sharing, and concern for the broader environment (so that the rivers, trees, etc. have their interests represented as well). Ubiquitous computing allows people to access and participate in the network through unobtrusive technological prostheses (mesh nets over their heads, projection into their glasses, etc.). Decisions are made by consensus, but without the annoyance of having to attend hours of meetings all the time. All this is beautifully presented, both in terms of the way that the writing conveys it (through community/environmental description without excessive infodumps) and in terms of being down to earth and deidealized (people are not any more perfect in such a setting than they are in capitalist America today, it is just that authority is decentralized and decisions are made better).

We get the point of view of Judy Wallach-Stevens, a woman who lives in the Chesapeake watershed. She has an extended family: she and her partner have a baby, and they live with another couple who also have a toddler. This enlarged household is also tied to other, surrounding ones (both through family relatedness, and simply through geographic proximity). Gender is refreshingly fluid and changeable; though some people identify themselves as “male” and “female,” many do not. Multiple sets of pronouns are used, and in terms of both physical presentation and community expectations, nobody is tied in to a single identity — they can stay as they are, if they are happy with that, but they can also shift if and when they want. There is no assignment of gendered responsibility for childraising; at a minimum, both adults identified as the parents share equally in childcare, and the other adults in an expanded household pitch in as well. (It is considered rude to enquire as to which parent actually physically bore the child in their womb).

Nation-states (like the US government) still exist, but they seem to have greatly reduced authority. Corporations exist too, but they have been exiled from the mainland of all continents, and exist only on artificial islands that they have constructed. The corporations still manufacture certain high tech goods that they can sell to the watersheds. The way financing works is not entirely clear, but in the watersheds most things are commonly available without money; and whatever monetary basis the corporations work with does not have the universal reach that finance does today. The corporations are evidently still very hierarchical, and they are always seeking to extend their power and regain the control they had in the 20th and early 21st centuries — so the watersheds still need to exercise vigilance with regard to them. However, the corporations as much as the watersheds have rejected traditional gender roles, and have replaced gender binaries with continually shifting forms of self-representation. These forms are central to the jockeying for dominance that is a major feature of corporate cultures, but again it is completely free of and apart from what we take for granted as male/female binaries.

All the world building in the novel is convincingly and vividly done. And it is solid enough that I was not bothered by questions of how the unaddressed portions of social organization and technological infrastructures might work.

At the same time that the background of Emrys’ world is conveyed, the narrative is mostly about how this organization and way of life is disrupted by First Contact. An alien spaceship lands in the Chesapeake region. The crew consists of two separate sentient species, originally from two separate planets, who have lived in symbiotic communities with each other for more than a thousand Earth years. There are ‘plains people’ who are sort of like human-sized arthropods on twelve or more legs; and ‘tree people’ who have mammal-like fur but look more like giant spiders (though again, they have a lot more limbs than actual spiders do). The aliens have learned to speak English from watching all the movies and television series that we have inadvertently beamed into space for decades. The aliens are organized into cross-species extended families, with gender systems that are a bit different from ours (I mean from the more liberated one that humans have in the novel’s future setting), but not unintelligibly so. They aliens place a very high value on their children, whom they take with them everywhere; part of the initial bond that the novel’s narrator makes with them is that she is nursing her own child when she first meets them.

The aliens are friendly, but they have an agenda. In the course of their technological development, both species destroyed the environments of their home planets. They now live in huge constructed orbital habitats around a single sun, all of which are kept in ecological balance around a planned, controlled, and limited ecosphere. They live in company with numerous trees and other plants, and with some nonsentient animal species; but this is (by their own admission) a rather limited environment compared to those of their original native planets. They are flourishing, but only because they have constructed an ecosphere that is basic enough for them to manage.

The aliens now seek to rescue other sentient species from ecological catastrophe. They are unhappy about having reached three planets in other solar systems too late, when the species in question had already exterminated themselves through self-generated environmental catastrophe. They are happy to have reached the Earth in time. What they want to do is rescue Homo sapiens by having us all abandon Earth en masse, and taking us instead to share their artificial space habitats. They hope to convince us by reason and persuasion to join them. But they are not averse to using force if they cannot get us peacefully to agree. They believe that if we refuse to abandon Earth we are endangering the lives of our children, so they have to force us for the children’s sake. (What would Lee Edelman say about this scenario?).

This creates confusion and disunity on Earth. The corporations love the idea of forcible removal. They see it as a way to increase their markets and their power, and maybe even to return to the practice of continual expansion that is no longer allowed on Earth, but that could be renewed on other planets throughout the galaxy. The nation-states are also attracted to the idea, for less extreme but somewhat similar reasons. But the narrator, and most of the people in the watersheds, unsurprisingly resist the idea of leaving Earth forever. They feel that they have made considerable progress in healing the Earth, and that as they continue to do so they will be able to live in reasonable harmony with a large and vibrant ecosystem, rather than with the severely reduced one that they aliens have created for themselves. Judy initially gets along well with the aliens — having been the first Earth person to meet them, and sharing their insistence on the importance of children — but tensions arise because of the aliens’ ultimate aims. But there are also a number of additional contributing factors that complicate and enrichen the narrative, including both interspecies sex between humans and aliens, and tensions that arise because the corporations deploy computer viruses to disrupt the watersheds’ networks.

So the novel has substantial dramatic tensions as well as great worldbuilding and great aliens. Things are semi-resolved (there is a reason why the “garden” of the title is only “half-built”) over the course of the book, mostly through complex negotiations among all the various parties. Discussions, arguments, shifting of locations and of background assumptions. One of the great things about the book is that it makes these negotiations as exciting and as emotionally compelling as violent conflicts are in other speculative novels. (I also appreciated all the specifically Jewish stuff in this book. Unusually for American literature, this is a book that is essentially non-Christian — by which I mean there are no traces of either a Christian or an anti-Christian sensibility).

On paper, I should have loved this book. It has peaceful first contact with aliens, people rising up against corporations to protect the planet, and interesting dynamics between humans and aliens, where the aliens think they know what's best for the humans, and the humans vehemently disagree. The aliens are definitely interesting, as they seem to value motherhood in general, and tend to take mothers more seriously than any other people (I honestly still don't know what to think about this, but it was, at least, a take I haven't seen before). It's also queernorm with a Jewish family at its heart, and I really liked seeing the way they still practiced their faith, even that far into the future. Unfortunately, I found the book really tedious to get through.

While this book has some really interesting ideas, it ultimately suffers from insufficient worldbuilding. It's written in first person POV from the perspective of Judy, who is narrating events that have already happened. It's unclear if this is as some kind of documentation for future generations or just in her own diary, but this choice means that we get no explanation about the world in which Judy lives, even though it's nowhere near our own. As someone who wasn't familiar with the term "watershed politics" and what that entails, the concept of the watershed networks remained hard to grasp until I finally starting Googling some of the terms the author was using. And it's not just the state of Earth at the time of the book; the way relationships work and what families look like doesn't get explained either. You find out early on that Judy and her wife, Carol, have another couple as co-parents, but what that means for how their household works, or what the relationship between the two couples is, remains a mystery until somewhere in the second half of the book. It made for a frustrating reading experience, since I was spending more time than I wanted to trying to form a mental image of how everything connected, and I would've preferred to spend that energy on digging deeper into the impact of first contact with the aliens. I just felt overwhelmed by all the information I was missing, which didn't make for a great reading experience.

A book that feels emotionally real with a future that predicts achievable technology and fascinating extrapolated polarized values, but also feels so much like old-school sci-fi that it's practically a nostalgic comfort read the first time around.

This was, frankly, excellent. This is the kind of philosophical, big-idea science fiction novel that changes the way you look at the world, that could be read and remembered for generations.

This is a first-contact novel. It’s set in our near-future, in a world where the excesses of capitalism have been reined in and humanity is working towards repairing the damage done to the planet. There’s a long way to go - climate refugees, frequent storms, massive wildfires, and the Mississippi deciding to change course are all low-key things happening in the background - but carbon levels are starting to go down, pollutants in the waters are being reduced, frogs are multiplying, and strict pollution controls are in place (even if everyone assumes the remaining corporate entities are skirting those to whatever degree they can get away with).

The aliens, it turns out, are actually two different species who have formed a unified, space-based culture. They’re eager to welcome a third species to their ranks, and have come to invite humanity to join them in the partially-completed Dyson sphere they’ve been building for the last thousand years or so. They’re delighted and relieved to have made it in time, they tell humanity. Every other time they’ve detected signals (centuries old, due to lightspeed) from a technological civilization, they’ve gone to the planet in question and found nothing but dead cities and ruined climates. A technological civilization, they tell humanity, is fundamentally unsustainable on a planet, and for their species to survive they *must* evacuate.

Humanity, being humanity, is of mixed opinions on this. Those who have been working the hardest to save the planet (including the protagonist) are very much against the idea of abandoning Earth now that we’re just starting to get it *right*. The corporations, direct descendants of those who so thoroughly broke things in the first place, are eager to get the hell off of this rock and resume their old endless-growth model in an environment with orders of magnitude more room and no pesky regulations getting in their way. Others are in between, eager to get humanity to the stars and yet unwilling to give up on Earth entirely.

The aliens, meanwhile, are having their own debate. They had been expecting to meet a people desperate for rescue and grateful to get away from their dying home. They’re unsure what to do about this mixed response, and they are asking themselves if they can, in good conscience, let these innocent, naïve people stay on their doomed planet, even if that’s what they say they want.

This book is all about learning about each other; not just human vs alien, but human vs human (vs human vs human vs human vs human vs…). Who we are, what we want, what’s important to us, and how we want to get there are all critical questions in this book. It doesn’t provide answers, clearly, because these are unanswerable questions - or, at least, everyone’s answer will be unique. But this book got me thinking about them, and I doubt I’ll think about them in exactly the same way again.

Comes out July 26. Mark your calendars.

Sometimes, you realize as you are reading that you have stumbled across something that is going to be a classic of the genre moving forward. Give it a few years, and this book will be required reading for defining what cli-fi even is. The story focuses on how multiple communities in a climate change ravaged earth respond to a group of aliens who want to help humans escape their dying planet. It's a really thoughtful look at what we value and what we think is worth fighting for. It's fascinating.

"A Half-Built Garden" is a great book, one that centers on a strong imagining of a future for humanity that comes about through courage and conviction in the face of disaster and incredible odds, and is a book that easily cements Ruthanna Emrys as an author to watch in the science fiction field.

In the future, humanity has seemingly narrowly avoided a full-scale climate apocalypse, and while things are difficult and humanity itself is still fractured into different groups with competing visions for the future, the hard work to live on a climate challenged Earth continues. Things get complicated when first contact is made with aliens that regard it as their sacred duty to rescue humanity from the dangerous, dying planet and bring them to the stars (a belief based on some amount of actual evidence, to be fair to the aliens).

With incredible character work, a moving and deeply thought-provoking exploration of ideals and ideas, and a tangible world with stakes that fee real but never completely overwhelm, this is a book you won't want to miss. An easy recommendation for genre fans, fans of Becky Chambers, and for people willing to read across genres.

I knew I liked Emrys - I've been enjoying her series of Lovecraftian novels for several years - but this book was just on a whole new level, and blew me away. It's a welcome addition to the newish genre of books that look optimistically at how humans might find new, better, more sustainable way to be communities after the apocalypse, a long, slow, thoughtful first-contact story. It's the future, and Judy, our main character, is part of a watershed community, working to slowly restore Earth's ecology after the disasters of our century. A spaceship arrives; the aliens have often seen technological societies destroy their own planets and bring extinction to their own species. They are so happy to arrive at Earth in time to rescue humanity, by taking everyone away from Earth to live with them in space, whether that's what all the humans want, or not. I loved the way, while there are a few villains here, mostly, it's a story of people who all mean well, and want to do what's right, but are in profound conflict about what the right actions are. Give yourself time to read slowly and really immerse yourself in the possibilities that Emrys invites us to consider, because the layers of ideas about community, colonialism, conflict, and communication have powerful implications for how we live now.