A Half-Built Garden
Nov. 28th, 2022 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraA Half-Built Garden, Ruthanna Emrys, 2022 novel. This book was very good and very interesting and I would like everyone to read it, please! I mean, if it is the sort of thing that interests you. First-contact in the late 21st century (2083, which I had a slight moment of shock relating to the present day and what ages of people currently we might expect to still be around then (very plausibly my personal children)). It is very closely in dialogue with Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and also has some various echoes of Deepness in the Sky and Have Spacesuit Will Travel. (Are you sold yet. Also v. queer. Also v. Jewish. Also I am Hugo-nominating it.)
More thoughts with spoilers:
So I think one of the things Emrys is interested in here is whether she can imagine a kinder/gentler/less traumatic version of the central conflict of Xenogenesis. Butler's apocalypse survivors are replaced by humans who are surviving and making progress on recovering from climate collapse; the aliens who want to save them from Earth are more alien in appearance but less so in culture (very heavy They Have Studied Our Broadcasts trope and are leaning way in to using human cultural references to connect, and also in terms of values/character personalities/the gaze we see them through). When the Garden main characters decide to make a human-alien family, it's voluntary, human-initiated, and does not involve a sacrifice of other human relationships. (And in comparison to Have Spacesuit, the trial in the end is much more equitable and results in the aliens trying out some human conflict-resolution processes, instead of it just being Humans On Trial.)
Misc thing I loved: Passover gets an important role in the plot and emotional arc in a way I found very moving.
Another thing: there are three factions of humans in the novel (the "networks", more or less eco-techno-anarcho-communists, the faction of the protagonist; NASA and the vestiges of the US government; and "the corporations" clinging to exploitative capitalism. I thought Emrys did a great job of portraying all three as sympathetic and appealing in different ways - in many ways, I thought the protagonist had the *least* sympathetic position (everyone else being like SPACE YES NOW THANKS) which was a really strong writing choice, like, I liked the protagonist, and so of course POV bias made me want to see it from her side, and yet I often agreed with arguments made by the other factions, so it felt a lot less strawmanny/why are these bad guys so gratuitously evil than a lot of SFF.
Gender, parenting: there's a lot of gender in this! I liked that trans characters were so central and beloved. I really liked the aliens trying to figure out human gender and how it related or didn't to human reproduction, and the ways the humans chose to talk or not talk about that, and the ways the aliens started to explore the possibilities of pronouns and more flexible gender roles. I loved the centering of parenting as this key area of connection (and also the practical details like always having to be thinking about nursing and diapers in the middle of these momentous historical events). (I'm really curious to hear what non-parents thought about this aspect...)
What isn't here: Emrys is very deft and I didn't even notice until near the end how good a job she did of keeping me from ever thinking about aspects of the 2083 world that she didn't want to get into. Like, ok, here's these three factions, but will so many of the present-day powers and forces really be gone by 2083? What's China up to? There's a lot here about gender, but very little to none about race - has white supremacy really faded or been eradicated in 60 years? (That would be great but I'm not optimistic.) With the corporations having been banished to artificial islands, it wasn't clear to me how much labor exploitation was even still going on - lots of mentions of them wanting to pollute/get around pollution restrictions, but, like, is there still child labor or forced labor, is there an immiserated underclass toiling in their factories, it's implied that there isn't, but that seems like an important question in how to read them. All three factions, even the corporations, seem to have embraced post-binary/post-essentialist takes on gender, which is obviously very cool (the corporations in an elaborate ritualized way that involves buying a lot of different wardrobes for strategic gender performace, but with the appealing flip side of one's actual gender (if any) being a private matter (I know this is not everyone's preference! but I personally don't prefer people I come into casual or operational contact with to know how I think about my gender, that's for when I'm being my personal self, not a role (ETA: and yet, hypocritically, I love my librarian's they/them button and when the kids' teachers put their pronouns in at the end of the email. So... I guess I'm a freerider in the gender world? Hm.))), but, like, has the pope gotten on board? Is there a pope? If anyone in this world is having a religious crisis over aliens showing up, we sure don't hear about it. And I think that's all fine, that's not what Emrys is here to talk about. It's a very tight focus, and that in itself might be a worldbuilding choice, that her 2083 people are sort of "care globally but think and act locally", like, these really aren't "world events" in a way, they are local events that just happen to be happening in this location to these locals, that also happen to have this bigger-picture significance. Interesting stuff.
More thoughts with spoilers:
So I think one of the things Emrys is interested in here is whether she can imagine a kinder/gentler/less traumatic version of the central conflict of Xenogenesis. Butler's apocalypse survivors are replaced by humans who are surviving and making progress on recovering from climate collapse; the aliens who want to save them from Earth are more alien in appearance but less so in culture (very heavy They Have Studied Our Broadcasts trope and are leaning way in to using human cultural references to connect, and also in terms of values/character personalities/the gaze we see them through). When the Garden main characters decide to make a human-alien family, it's voluntary, human-initiated, and does not involve a sacrifice of other human relationships. (And in comparison to Have Spacesuit, the trial in the end is much more equitable and results in the aliens trying out some human conflict-resolution processes, instead of it just being Humans On Trial.)
Misc thing I loved: Passover gets an important role in the plot and emotional arc in a way I found very moving.
Another thing: there are three factions of humans in the novel (the "networks", more or less eco-techno-anarcho-communists, the faction of the protagonist; NASA and the vestiges of the US government; and "the corporations" clinging to exploitative capitalism. I thought Emrys did a great job of portraying all three as sympathetic and appealing in different ways - in many ways, I thought the protagonist had the *least* sympathetic position (everyone else being like SPACE YES NOW THANKS) which was a really strong writing choice, like, I liked the protagonist, and so of course POV bias made me want to see it from her side, and yet I often agreed with arguments made by the other factions, so it felt a lot less strawmanny/why are these bad guys so gratuitously evil than a lot of SFF.
Gender, parenting: there's a lot of gender in this! I liked that trans characters were so central and beloved. I really liked the aliens trying to figure out human gender and how it related or didn't to human reproduction, and the ways the humans chose to talk or not talk about that, and the ways the aliens started to explore the possibilities of pronouns and more flexible gender roles. I loved the centering of parenting as this key area of connection (and also the practical details like always having to be thinking about nursing and diapers in the middle of these momentous historical events). (I'm really curious to hear what non-parents thought about this aspect...)
What isn't here: Emrys is very deft and I didn't even notice until near the end how good a job she did of keeping me from ever thinking about aspects of the 2083 world that she didn't want to get into. Like, ok, here's these three factions, but will so many of the present-day powers and forces really be gone by 2083? What's China up to? There's a lot here about gender, but very little to none about race - has white supremacy really faded or been eradicated in 60 years? (That would be great but I'm not optimistic.) With the corporations having been banished to artificial islands, it wasn't clear to me how much labor exploitation was even still going on - lots of mentions of them wanting to pollute/get around pollution restrictions, but, like, is there still child labor or forced labor, is there an immiserated underclass toiling in their factories, it's implied that there isn't, but that seems like an important question in how to read them. All three factions, even the corporations, seem to have embraced post-binary/post-essentialist takes on gender, which is obviously very cool (the corporations in an elaborate ritualized way that involves buying a lot of different wardrobes for strategic gender performace, but with the appealing flip side of one's actual gender (if any) being a private matter (I know this is not everyone's preference! but I personally don't prefer people I come into casual or operational contact with to know how I think about my gender, that's for when I'm being my personal self, not a role (ETA: and yet, hypocritically, I love my librarian's they/them button and when the kids' teachers put their pronouns in at the end of the email. So... I guess I'm a freerider in the gender world? Hm.))), but, like, has the pope gotten on board? Is there a pope? If anyone in this world is having a religious crisis over aliens showing up, we sure don't hear about it. And I think that's all fine, that's not what Emrys is here to talk about. It's a very tight focus, and that in itself might be a worldbuilding choice, that her 2083 people are sort of "care globally but think and act locally", like, these really aren't "world events" in a way, they are local events that just happen to be happening in this location to these locals, that also happen to have this bigger-picture significance. Interesting stuff.
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Date: 2022-11-28 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 04:35 am (UTC)