A Half-Built Garden

I've found myself reading more Climate Fiction recently, not because I've been searching it out, I don't think, but because it's so much on everyone's mind that more is getting published. In any case, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but I've had a recent run of "climate fiction" that I would describe as optimistic. Possibly, it used to be that it felt like the urgent agenda re: The Climate was convincing everyone it was really that bad, but now it feels like the urgent agenda is convincing people that there is something to be done about it.

In any case, A Half Built Garden falls into the latter camp, but it is also a first contact story, which I am predisposed to like. In this story, the Earth is covered by autonomous but interconnected "Dandelion Networks" who work to restore Earth's ecology and strictly measure out their carbon budget. Complicating this, governments still attempts to govern, but have lost control of many of the resources they once commanded, including much of their public support. Furthermore, "the corporations" have been firewalled away on artificial islands, for their refusal to curtail their environmental impact, but still are active and engaging in trade for goods no one else can make.

Then the aliens arrive, and our heroine is in the right place at the right time carrying the right baby to get her foot in the door first as the aliens' favourite negotiator.

I like that Earth in the future is full of petty squabbles and dumb meetings, because I can believe a lot from my speculative fiction, but not that humanity has changed that much. The Dandelion networks are supposed to be utopian, but they do not require to me to believe that everyone gets along frictionlessly. One of the key technologies that permits the dandelion networks, however, is an algorithm that facilitates collaborative decision-making, upvoting and downvoting certain kinds of discussion threads to promote decisions in line with the network's declared values, and I admit this is the point where I felt the story had introduced Unobtainium to make the plot work.

I really enjoyed that big queer family structures were central to the characters' lives and even the plot. Every society had subtly or strongly different ideas of how families and genders worked, and this gave the humans and aliens different points of friction and connection, and I felt this was well done.

I enjoyed that the aliens were very alien, both biologically and socially, but also had individual personalities.

I am going to be honest that I enjoyed this book so much that I am not actually very objective about it. I loved this book. This book for me is what Becky Chambers' books are for other people.

I enjoy a good first contact story. In this version aliens touch down in the Chesapeake Watershed. A woman is sent out in the middle of the night to monitor some new contaminants and stumbles across the spaceshipI quite enjoyed the world building in this story. In this version of the 2080s, river networks are the organizing basis for large populations of ecologically minded people who strive to live in cooperation while actively working to heal the Earth. Basically, take everything that would make conservative Americans start to hyperventilate and make a society out of it. I loved it. Can we have that please?
The people at the center of this story are a Jewish polyamorous queer couple with an infant who have just set up a household with two co-parents who have a toddler. They are just starting to work out how their household will function when they suddenly have to try to figure out how to blend the desires of three species. I liked that decisions were made basically in real-time Reddit threads with discussions between anyone logged in and moderated by algorithms that make sure that the decision represents the agreed upon community values. It also shows what can happen when technology like this that is heavily relied on is sabotaged. There are humans who don't like this set up. There is still a United States government representing some humans. Followers of corporations live on artificial islands in a very different societal system. This book is dense with ideas and interactions. That made it a slow read for me. I had to pay very close attention to what was happening every moment. There are ideas in this book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Wow this story blew me away. The future that the author paints and the way that the dandelion networks operate is really a true work of art. I loved the characters, the themes, and the perspective of this book. It gave me a spike in my already-elevated levels of climate anxiety right in time for the Inflation Reduction Act to get passed, so it coincidentally made that win much sweeter (even though that bill isn't perfect).

Giving the book 4.5 stars instead ofb5 because I felt a bit of a disconnect between my reading style and the authors writing style that made it difficult to comprehend some sentences on a first read. Nothing too difficult, just a bit of a disconnect where I had to read sentences a few times and it knocked me out of the reading flow.

This book is really beautiful because it does what we need speculative cli-fi to do - it imagines a future world in ways that inspire hope and action. Particularly as an IT person who works with a conservation science org, this book shifted the way I see both digital networks and also conservation work.

Very well worth reading.