Thursday, October 6, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

 



A Half-Built Garden is the latest novel from author Ruthanna Emrys, who I'd previously known for her Lovecraft Subversion, "The Innsmouth Legacy" (which began with Winter Tide and continued with Deep Roots).  Emrys is a queer Jewish author, and that was felt a bit in those two novels (where one big side character was a gay Jew), which were really really good in how they flipped the Lovecraft narrative on its head to center those oppressed by society and the government as they tried to find their own lives when that same government years later tried to get their help in matters involving their past history and culture (which were lost due to that very same government's intervention).  They were incredibly fascinating novels, with really great characters, and I was super excited to see Emrys' next novel, this stand-alone first contact novel.  

And A Half-Built Garden is a fascinating and often wonderful novel, featuring a queer Jewish protagonist in a story that is part First-Contact, part ecological science fiction, part hopeful recovery from apocalyptic disaster.  It's a fascinating novel of conflicting ideologies, dealing with both past, present and future, as our protagonist Judy and her family, coming from a group dedicated to restoring our planet from the devastation wreaked by corporations and others, encounter a group of two species of aliens who come to help humanity by taking them away from the planet, due to a belief that advanced societies always outgrow their planets, which they destroy.  And so this results in a fascinating tale dealing with families, with connections, and gender, and so much more....it doesn't all work, but it's immensely satisfying nonetheless.  Even more so for this Jewish reader.  


-------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Years ago, the Watershed Networks, groups of people believing they could work together to reverse the damage done to the Earth, rose up together and pushed away the forces that had damaged it so badly - the Nation States and especially the Corporations which exploited the Earth's resources in the name of greed.  Now, in the year 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens, her wife Carol, and the rest of her family work as part of the Chesapeake Bay network, working to heal the world....and the effort seems to their metrics to be paying off.  

But then one night, Judy investigates a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay, along with Carol and her daughter Dori....and finds the last thing she expected: an ship filled with two different species of space aliens, with a specific message: that advanced societies always outgrow their home planets and ought to leave to the stars in order to survive.  And so the aliens insist to Judy that humanity needs to accept their help in order to survive, and to quit their efforts to save Earth....or else.  

Judy and her family, and the rest of the Watershed Networks, believe that the aliens are wrong, and that saving the Earth is saving an essential part of humanity and well worth the attempt.  And so they attempt to connect with the aliens, who call themselves the Ringers, to make them understand their perspective.  But other forces on Earth, the Nation-States (like the US Government) and the Corporate Entities, are also aware of the presence of the Ringers, and don't quite have the same attachment to the Earth as Judy and her people...and if the Ringers believe them, humanity might not have a chance to save the Earth before being taken by force.....
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A Half-Built Garden is told largely from the first person perspective of Judy, even with some interludes in which a few other characters get third person point of view segments.  And Judy is a fascinating character: A queer Jewish woman whose immediate family includes her wife Carol and another couple Athëo and Dinar and their child Raven, who live in a poly-grouping, even if Athëo and Dinar aren't lovers with the other two yet (and the grouping hasn't decided if they will ever take that step, instead focusing mainly on supporting each other as a single family unit).  Each of these characters have their own personalities and characters, no less than Judy herself, who is devoted to her family and to the dream of the Watershed Networks in repairing the Earth, and finds herself desperate to show the Ringers how that dream isn't an impossible one...and that their family unit is worth allowing to thrive instead of being uprooted.  And then there's Judy's birth family, who belong to a more radical group within the Networks (the Bet) and whose large group activities of adults and kids is a bit too overwhelming for Judy, even if she still loves them. 

And a key part of this book is that all of these characters mean well and are trying to help in the ways they think they can, even if those helping efforts wind up being counterproductive.  Judy's immediate family grouping each has their own personalities - particularly Athëo, who is fiercely protective due to his surviving of his prejudicial anti-trans birth parents and Dinar, who is far more willing to work with individuals from the Corporations than anyone else, believing that they can be brought back into the fold of humanity instead of needing to be utterly eradicated.  The same is true of not only the Bet, but also the alien Ringers themselves, who may have some negative traits in their matriarchal society and obsession with forcing humans to abandon Earth, but are merely acting in these ways because it is what they know works and they think must be the way for a species to survive.  

The result is a fascinating novel of conflicting ideas and ideologies, of how peoples can connect, of how they can understand and teach each other, and how they can all move forward.  It's a novel where Emrys uses Judy's queerness and her Jewishness to teach the importance of connections and families, as they try to preach understanding of points of view of every element of the Earth and of Peoples, and how parents and families need to provide guidance while also allowing their charges room to grow and move forward in ways their parents might not originally anticipate, but which are right for them and aren't actively harmful.  It's a novel that does interesting things with gender and connections between peoples who are very different - even of different species - and of how they signal those differences in many ways.  And it presents its ideas largely really well.  

There are some parts that don't work as well.  The corporations are kind of fascinating once they come into play, especially with how their entire structure is built upon competition (see capitalism) and that includes gender, with gender and pronouns being used therein to signal roles in the "Game" rather than anything permanent about a person - especially when we see outliers in the corporate entities, a pair of neurodivergent people (in different ways, even as the two we see are a pair who always go together) who aren't quite able to signal in the ways that more successful corporate agents are and function sort of despite that to some extent.  But there are some corporate agents who are almost mustache twirling villains and it kind of undermines it all with how obviously evil these characters are.  The nation-state character representative, a mother from NASA, gets a few moments but is otherwise just kind of there and isn't really a full character like the others. 

And most importantly, the book's ending, in which other aliens come into play, feels incredibly rushed as antagonist characters (not evil, but just antagonistic from the perspective of the protagonists) are argued off of their views and to give Judy and her networks a chance incredibly quickly.  I had to read it a few times just to see if something happened that I missed and it just feels like the book needed an extra 50 pages of talking to make it all work. 

Still, what is there is a fascinating set of characters, ideas, and more in first contact/ecological sci-fi, and one of the more interesting novels of the year.  It's an optimistic one which is still recognizable as showing a potential future for us, and the book's passover seder scene is truly tremendous and worth the price of the book alone.  Recommended.   

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