Today’s review was brought to you by the many people who suggested I read this book, beginning with Ada Palmer who suggested in it during our Yuri Studio chat about Tezuka, Revolutionary Girl Utena and her own amazing Terra Ignota Series, (of which I reviewed the first book, Too Like The Lightning and last book, Perhaps the Stars, here) to our own YNN Correspondent David M, some folks who worked on the book and many others.

Today we’re talking about A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

As a long-time science fiction fan, I have read and watched my share of first-contact stories, but rarely have I encountered one so fully thought through. It’s a joke among scifi fans that so many of the cultures we encounter are humanoidish, but from a visual media perspective, until computers caught up with human imagination, it was just…easier… to represent. In good media, issues of language and  and culture are addressed. In many media, sex and mating are addressed, good, bad and indifferent. In A Half-Built Garden, Emrys takes a look at not only the cultural differences and similarities between human and alien, but between humans and other humans, among individuals who represent different environmental and economic priorities, religions, gender and sexuality constructs, clothing, language, and desires for the future.

Like Rose of Versailles, in which Riyoko Ikeda-sensei attempts to make sense of the vast scope of the French Revolution, by having us experience it through one person’s perspective, Emrys too, takes on a First Contact situation from the perspective of one woman. Set in an immediate future where humanity has turned the tide of climate change by bonding in “watershed” polities, with limited central government and corporate influence significantly curtailed, to the point of physical exile, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to find an alien ship polluting her local watershed. With her wife and infant daughter, she heads out to make contact with the aliens.

What follows is an extraordinary story of negotiation, adventure, personal relationships and making new friends across all the possible gaps that can exist between cultures.

What drew to this story was that it was positioned by many people as aspirational science fiction. I know there are plenty of folks who prefer their scifi gritty, but personally, what draws me to science fiction has always been the ability to create new solutions for old problems then new solutions to the new problems that come from them. Because I am also a realist, I am a believer in change – and that unintended consequences are a reality of that change. Therefore reform needs to be updated over time. Emrys’ book is wholly grounded in this idea – that every change, every moment of progress needs to be constantly monitored and adjusted…and problems that develop are an inevitability and, possibly, an opportunity.

As readers of queer media we highlight here on Okazu, folks may also find this story interesting for what it does in terms of addressing gender and sexuality…and in certain cases, gender role. Where the watershed folks, known as the Dandelion Networks, have roughly the same level of nuance about gender and sexuality as you and I, the corporate folks have a far, far more elaborate and political series of genders, indicated by clothing, pronouns, roles and behavior. Because gender is presumed to be fluid, they have a gender for someone you haven’t seen in at least a few hours, and therefore may not know which gender they currently are. I found this fascinating…and felt the entire segment of corporate life was left open-ended for a book of it’s own.

Parenting is a major chunk of the cultural exchange here with the Ringers, the name the aliens give themselves in English. When they meet the head Ringer Glycosine, a  Mother (a kind of ship captain) with two children, Judy and Carol are co-parenting two children with another couple, both of whom are trans as we understand that concept. Judy herself is Jewish and keeps kosher, while other characters are vegan, pagan and ex-fundamentalist Christian. The Ringers’ ideas of religion, food, ritual, storytelling, sex, gender and sexuality are all expressed within the story in ways that feel utterly organic. At one of the first meetings between humans and Ringers, Judy’s family puts out gender ID pins and several of the Ringers choose pins for themselves…one, at odds with the gender the rest of the Ringers associate with them. It was a fantastic, small shake-up, one that portends many much larger questions that both humans and aliens had to ask of themselves.

Of the Ringers, it is almost impossible to dislike Rhamnetin, whose job it is to ask – and answer – awkward questions. Other Ringers are richly written, with fully fleshed-out personalities. One spent the book hoping that everyone could make this work. And whether they do is left to our imaginations, which is exactly where it should be.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

If you are looking for aspirational science fiction or what Ada Palmer terms Hopepunk, I can highly recommend this book to you. A Half-Built Garden leaves plenty of space for our own imagination to grow.