A Half-Built Garden

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

I was first drawn to this book because of the title, I am an amateur gardener, and I love a good gardening-as-metaphor. I also enjoy SciFi that deals with First Contact, and the ethical ecology and environmental concerns were a plus too, so I dove in quickly. The first half was a lot of getting used to the procedure and politics the communities in the story rely on, so I moved a little slow initially. Once into the meat of the story, it moved along well, and I was pulled in for the entire second half!

Emrys starts us off in a post-catastrophic-climate-change earth, where the majority of humanity is working to heal the earth, protect essential ecology and live in harmony with it. Family structures and understanding of gender have also evolved in refreshing ways, and there's just a lot of simple contentment and hope in these parts of the book. The plot begins when an alien ship with a mission to save humanity from the dying earth before it's too late lands near one-such community. The interspecies interactions and negotiations are at times thoughtful and interesting, and at times fraught with misunderstanding. The challenges of trying to choose a few people to negotiate on behalf of all of humanity were realistic - and as you can imagine there is definitely conflict in there to make for some good fictional friction.

I enjoyed how events played out as a story, and I've also found myself talking about the concept of this book to several different friends as climate change has been more on our minds this summer with some very extreme events happening around the world. While this book is of course fictional, it feels relevant in the way that good SciFi can. I would definitely recommend giving it a read!