A Half-Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys

A Half-Built Garden

By Ruthanna Emrys

  • Release Date: 2022-07-26
  • Genre: Science Fiction
Score: 4
4
From 25 Ratings
$11.99 On itunes Buy on Amazon

Description

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.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Reviews

  • Enjoyable

    5
    By Peter Rontea
    This is my first book by Ruthanna. I found out about it on Schneier.com: “In her remarkable novel A Half-Built Garden, imagines how AI might help people have better conversations and make better decisions—rather than taking advantage of these biases to maximize profits.” I cannot wait to read it again.

  • A Solar-Punk First-Contact Novel

    4
    By Prairie_Dog
    “A Half-Built Garden” is a very different type of novel by Ruthanna Emrys. It could be classified as solar-punk as well as first contact. It’s set in 2083, and there has been a bottom-up ecological and social revolution. The Watersheds are the predominant organizations, and they seek to save the world from climate change and the legacy of pollution. National governments have become secondary, and corporations have been exiled to their enclaves where they maintain their own strange complex cultures. The world is improving slowly rather than getting worse, so humanity has reason for hope. Then the two types of aliens arrive. They set their damaged starship down in Chesapeake Watershed, and begin broadcasting based on intercepted human signals. They are here to rescue us, as in their experience, sapient species must expand into space to survive. Those that do not leave their home worlds die along with those worlds when their technological evolution destroys the biosphere of their planets. They have followed electromagnetic signals to find two extinct species so far. Humanity is the first species they have found out of their home star system that is still living. This is the crux of the novel, the aliens believe they have to save humanity from the ecological collapse of the Earth. Most of humanity has become dedicated to preventing that collapse, and believes it is making progress. Can these two ideologies and three species come to symbiosis?

Comments

Advertisement

Maximize your website's potential with Website Statistic

Get insights into your website traffic, analyze your website's audience, and optimize your website for better results with Website Statistic.

More by Ruthanna Emrys