A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

Overview

A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.

On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm—and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force.

But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world livable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal our wounded planet.

Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250210982
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	114,856
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots, and the Imperfect Commentaries collection. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She creates real versions of imaginary foods in her crowded kitchen, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2022

Emrys (the Innsmouth Legacy series) describes this ambitious near-future mix of climate fiction, first-contact sci-fi, and celebration of Jewish motherhood as her “diaperpunk novel.” In a climate change–ravaged 2083, climate activist Judy Wallach-Stevens and her wife, Carol, live and coparent their infant, Dori, with couple Atheo and Dinar, who have a toddler of their own, Raven. This unconventional family are the first humans to encounter a group of galaxy-hopping aliens led by the insect-like First Mother Cytosine and her infants. The aliens want humanity to join them in symbiotic space, leaving behind an Earth they see as doomed—and they’re willing to use force. But Judy and her family have put their all into saving the planet, agitating against greedy capitalistic corporations and with little help from much diminished national governments, and they’re unwilling to give up on its future. Judy’s hesitant attempts at diplomacy succeed as she and the aliens find common ground in shared experiences of child rearing and nursing. Along the way, Judy learns “a different, equally valuable sort of love” with an arachnoid alien. Emrys’s optimistic vision of interspecies collaboration may strain belief for some readers. It’s idealism carried to a light-years-away extreme, buoyed by children binding people together. The result is thought-provoking, if not wholly successful. (July)

Publishers Weekly

A Locus Recommended Reading Pick!

A Goodreads Most Anticipated Summer Read!

“This complex, complicated, gorgeous musing on the future of humanity and the power of connection, the things we owe to each other and the essential strength of consensus, deserves to be the first contact novel that defines a generation.” —Seanan McGuire

“Emrys creates such an optimistic view of what the future could be and does so using some of the best ideas of where humanity is headed. She doesn’t shy away from the devastation to come, but she does offer rays of hope for both humanity and nature.” —Booklist

“A fascinatingly rich and original vision of our future world, explored at a moment of crisis; a vitally important exploration of the meaning of family and community; and a refraction of today's conundrums through a fresh interpretation of first contact.” —Malka Older

“Emrys’ fast-paced and fun story paints a picture of a future that’s imaginable within our lifetimes. Hers is a unique and ultimately hopeful vision of the world we might bequeath to our grandchildren.” —Karl Schroeder

“Emrys presents a fascinating future full of possibilities in conversation with the more popularly imagined stark dystopian future of environmental collapse and corporate control.” —Buzzfeed News

“A spectacular first-contact novel about complicated utopias and networked conflict - it's a wild ride, and a perfect example of one of the smartest structural analyses of sf I ever heard.” —Corey Doctorow

“Rigorously imagined, gentle and terrifying by turns, this book is a visit to a hopeful near future filled with bright possibilities and intriguing characters who hope to draw Earth beyond the brink of Anthropocene ruin.”
—L. X. Beckett

“An incisive, meaty, dive into an imperfect future shaped by the hard truth that escaping a bad system is the easy part, building better is where the work begins. Emrys masterfully demonstrates how a medium-good future can send more chilling warnings than dystopia about how hard making a good world truly is.” —Ada Palmer

“Thought-provoking.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2022-05-25
Aliens arrive on a near-future Earth bringing a dire warning: Leave the planet or die.

One spring night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens is voluntarily on call to monitor water quality detectors near Chesapeake Bay. After a global revolution, Earth is now divided among collective networks known as watersheds as well as mega-corporations with strictly limited powers and some remaining nation-states. When Judy arrives at the sensors with her wife, Carol, and their infant, Dori, they find a craft carrying multilimbed, pill bug–like aliens as well as another species resembling a large furry spider. They all speak near-perfect English thanks to years of listening to old transmissions from Earth, and they come with a startling message: “All species must leave their birth worlds, or give up their technological development, or die. You are very close.” The aliens offer all their knowledge to the human race but only if it leaves Earth permanently. First contact with aliens obviously isn’t a new premise, but this story tries to offer its own spin by leaning heavily on the ideals of cooperation and mutual agreement. Although this is a refreshing change from the variously grim dystopias of a lot of SF, its execution here almost completely lacks tension; any conflict that arises is swiftly solved, with all parties coming to an understanding. The author burdens the worldbuilding with unneeded details about how infotech collaboration works but skimps on specifics of how the societal structure of the planet changed so completely in just 61 years. At the same time, there’s an odd mix of high and low technology use among characters; for instance, people carry babies in slings and nurse them on demand, but the same infants wear “smarthemp” diapers that notify parents on network-linked “mesh” devices when they’re wet. There are also multiple lengthy discussions of genders and pronouns and what they mean to humans and aliens alike, but it’s all handled in an uninspired and sometimes clunky way.

A well-meaning story kept earthbound by flawed execution.

Kirkus Reviews