Book review: 'A Half-Built Garden'

[My friend Tracy Harms, formerly of Cleveland, now in the mountains of Colorado, came back into town a few months ago and mentioned he was reading a really interesting novel. When he finished it, he offered to give me a book review, and as this is by definition a blog for people who like to read, I thought sumbunall of you might be interested. The Management.]

By TRACY B. HARMS
Special guest blogger

What If? What if climate change actually is an existential crisis, but humanity gets on top of the problem? What if the political climate shifts to reprioritize around Earth's ecology? What if technology is deployed to reverse the accumulated effects of early industrialization, while providing an improving standard of living for humans? What if technology is directed toward understanding the biosphere, understanding economic production trade-offs, and helping people come to agreement using such information?

What if, in getting our act together, humanity winds up Woke As Fuck?

A Half-Built Garden is a 2022 novel by Ruthanna Emrys that's utopian, introspective, tech-savvy, intricate, and full of amusement.  It's totally conformant to the familiar formula of first contact stories.  There aren't a lot of surprises to be had here at the large scale. The title tips us off to the optimism that pervades this story. The dance of attempts between humans and aliens at mutual comprehension proceeds with rather few twists and turns; this isn't a display of dazzling plot construction. It is, however, an intricate accomplishment of character development, relationship nuance, social variety, and cultural tensions.

This novel is indisputably Hard Sci Fi, at least if one concedes the familiar allowance that the aliens show up with a faster-than-light hack.  Who among us will not happily allow that in?  It's required for the classic First Contact motif and does not grate.

Insofar as we look at the technology of Earth in this near-future setting, it's an extremely plausible extension from today, with features that are impressive advancements for the few years it rolls the calendar forward. Computer interface improvements stand out, but the innovations in communication networking are a foreground topic.  Biology is also prominent as a science continually relevant to story development.  The one tech aspect I thought might be unrealistic was an absence of AI-chatbots; even new SF novels can't help being dated.

What we yearn for in science fiction is not just portrayals of technologically improved futures, though, right?  We (or at least, I) want a story that shows how people live in some imagined world of the future.  How are their lives different? What's normal then that's not normal now?  What new problems do they have?  What tensions are they carrying from the past, especially around whatever changed in the world between our Now and this fictional Later?

A Half-Built Garden delivers big-time in that regard.  Learning about society on Earth is arguably more interesting than learning about the society of the newly arrived aliens, which is saying something.  The aliens are indeed alien, with various complexities among them that lead to suspenseful situations.  But the humans are alien, too.  Or maybe they're extremely familiar.  It will depend on who you know, what circles you frequent, and what counts as normal in your family and among your friends.

Which is why I capitalized "woke" near the start of this review.  If that word sets you off, and if adding to it ideas like "trans" make it worse, you might find this novel difficult to get through.  The dominant powers that be in this world of the future might be called commune-dwelling eco-freaks or even "radical left lunatics" to borrow a phrase from a successful politician.  There's nothing between this book's covers that's going to buffer the reader from ontological shock if these sorts of people aren't part of the reader's ontology.

Yet, everyone is up against this problem, not just readers of A Half-Built Garden but also the characters within it.  Diversity rubs everybody the wrong way, at some limit, and this story is about hitting those limits and having to find ways to overcome the frictions. It's a tale of problems and problem-solving where social problems are prominent and their solutions vital.  Yet these clashes are frequently very funny.  I grinned and laughed out loud often!

Between the plausible and distinctive personalities we're introduced to and the unfamiliar layers at which these people clash, the story is propelled by psychological engagement. Yes, it's a slow burn; this is not begging to become an action movie.  There's a good deal of cooking, eating, and cleaning up. There's child care to be done.  There are crops to be grown and pollution to be monitored.  Real life doesn't stop just because the aliens popped in unexpectedly.  That's part of the implicit message of this book: how we choose to live had better be viable for the long term if we're actually serious about survival over the long term.

By the climax of the story we have come to know roughly a handful of factions that are contending to shape the future according to their own sensibilities.  All of them have the long-term, large-scale flourishing of all people as their goal.  It truly isn't clear which options are best, but it is clear that some possibilities would be tragic.  The author succeeds at communicating several conflicting perspectives rather than collapsing the crisis into a sermon as to How We Should Solve Global Warming, a possibility one guesses might have been tempting.

What arrives instead is a sense of priority to problem solving and how the adoption of appropriate means is itself a valuable end.  It's a meditation on the necessity of change, the discomforts of change, and an optimism of approaching impending change with resolve to cherish one's values in the process.  Pretty cool if you ask me.  With the final page turned, I'm going to miss the people I got to know in A Half-Built Garden.