A Half-Built Garden
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3.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extraterrestrial 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books.
Customer Reviews
A study in contrasts
There are several things I liked, maybe even loved, about this book. And quite a few that just completely drove me up the wall.
On the plus side, it doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to the conflict between the heedless infinite-growth-and-profit-oriented corporate mindset and the contrasting hippie/ecotopian worldview. There is also some intriguing nuance about how the people within the corporations, or at their margins, feel about the morality of their participation. And it is frequently funny, or at least witty.
This story also is an interesting gender-swapped counterpoint to the “Project Hail Mary” take on human contact with the unknown.
On the flipside, it is far, far too religious for my tastes. Even its best attempt to include an atheist perspective feels more like tokenism than empathy. And the particular flavor of the religious content rides very close to the line of propaganda in the current political context.
Also while for the first few minutes the relentless enthusiasm for “pronouns“ and diverse perspectives on gender are entertaining, by the end even for a non-binary person like myself it feels like a forced march through a TikTok parody of current progressive culture.
Finally, this book can’t quite decide whether it wants to be a optimistic speculation about the future of the species like Contact, a character-driven and tightly-woven tale like Arrival, or a narrative of competing civilizations in the fashion of Ursula K Leguin.
In short, if your feelings about pronouns lean towards “the more, the better,” you have at least a latent inclination towards xenophilia, and the thought of ancient religions surviving into the distant future brings you more comfort than distress, this might be your jam.