“When I think of a tree, I think of moving between the branches, and how whenever I reach out I find a new branch that takes me where I need to go. The universe is the same way. If you reach out, you’ll eventually grasp the next branch. Sometimes people reach in the wrong direction, or miss their grip, or find a dead stick that cracks, but that’s not the tree’s fault. There’s always a next branch, you just need to find it.

“That’s what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other – we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together. And there’s something in the universe, a principle or a force or an awareness, that makes sure that there will always be a next branch.”

A Half-Built Garden (2022) is a masterful and urgent first contact novel that stands as a modern classic of speculative fiction. Ruthanna Emrys’ previous novels were the excellent Winter Tide (2017) and Deep Roots (2018), books in her Innsmouth Legacy series that used H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out Of Innsmouth’ as a springboard to criticize Lovecraft’s racism and interrogate the USA’s attitudes towards race, culture and belonging. With A Half-Built Garden, she surpasses even those novels to create a novel that manages to engage hopefully with the climate crisis whilst responding to Octavia Butler’s iconic Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89). While the Xenogenesis books imagine the alien Oankali coming to Earth and rescuing the survivors from a nuclear war in exchange for symbiosis, Emrys imagines a situation where the aliens come and offer to save us from a dying world but we’ve already started the long and complex process of undoing the damage we’ve done to the planet and trying to live with the Earth in a less destructive manner. Thus Emrys is able to explore the complex power dynamics of humans attempting to negotiate their future with a far more advanced people whilst at the same time imagining how a society built around repairing the damage of climate change and pollution to the planet might look and feel like. It’s an astounding work of science fictional imagination that demonstrates just how vital the genre can be at its best.

Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes in the middle of the night to unexpected warnings of unknown pollutants in Chesapeake Bay, and goes with her wife Carol and their baby Dori to investigate. Instead of a false alarm or an environmental problem, she finds a landed spaceship and unwittingly takes part in first contact with the alien Ringers. The Ringers are a symbiotic alliance between the plains-folk, who live on the ground and look like giant pillbugs crossed with pangolins, and the tree-folk, giant ten-legged spiders with mouths on their legs who live in the trees. The Ringers have been watching humanity and learning their languages and culture from our broadcasts, and have come in their ship the Solar Flare to save humanity from the dying Earth. However, they find a humanity split over their offer. People have woken up to the damage they have done to the planet, and are actively trying to fix it – the corporations have been overthrown and are contained in the islands of Zealand, and communities based around watersheds work together to undo the damage humanity has done to Earth and to monitor and reduce levels of pollutants in the environment. Those who live in the watersheds, like Judy and her family, want to stay on the Earth and continue working and living with it. However the corporations see an opportunity for expansion and to reassert their relevance, and NASA, with the remnants of the US government behind it, wants to return to space. Judy finds herself in the complicated position of the Ringers’ chosen representative for humanity, having to bargain with the Ringers for Earth’s future whilst the corporations scheme and plot behind her back.

The appearance of the Ringers’ plains-folk, with their multiple white tentacles and limbs, is clearly meant to evoke the Oankali of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Where the Oankali arrive and offer symbiosis to the humans who survive a devastating nuclear war, the Ringers offer symbiosis to humanity at the cost of leaving behind their planet which humans are working to save to die. But Emrys’ textual referencing of Butler goes far beyond pastiche or tribute, or even just a clever reimagining of the complicated power dynamics Butler explores in her books. Emrys, like Butler, is interested in both the big questions of how aliens and humans might interact across different cultures and power dynamics, but also the way in which this plays out on an individual and interpersonal level. At its heart, this becomes a book about Judy’s family – Carol and Dori, Dori’s co-parents Athëo and Dinar and their child Raven, their extended families and their watershed network that form their community – and the Ringers’ family who came on the Solar Flare – ship mother plains-folk Cytosine and her children Diamond and Chlorophyll, her three mates,  her cross-brother tree-folk Rhamnetin and an additional two cross-brothers, cross-sister and cross-nice. The narrative and emotional arc of the book becomes about these two families learning to drop their preconceptions and relate to each other as people until they can merge into a new family unit that represents the future of humanity’s relationship with the Ringers. Along the way, Emrys explores everything from how humanity and the Ringers’ differing understanding of gender works – Carol is a transwoman and Athëo is a transman, whilst the Ringers’ culture is matriarchal, something that winds up being as dangerous and limiting as a patriarchal culture – to the sharing of religious festivals and rituals and how different people with wildly different perspectives might work together to find common ground.

If the novel only consisted of this it would still be a powerful and brilliantly executed work of speculative fiction, but A Half-Built Garden is even more complex and multi-layered than that. The future Emrys imagines – the year 2083 – is one in which humanity has had to radically alter how it organizes itself and how it interacts with the planet to ameliorate the damage of climate change. Emrys’ brilliantly detailed imagining of alternate future ways of social organization reminds me of Ada Palmer’s incredibly ambitious Terra Ignota series (2016-2021), not because it is like Palmer’s imagined future but because of the thought, care and intelligence that have gone into creating a believable, lived-in future in which factions with differing agendas and ways of doing things co-exist in an uneasy truce. With the corporations banished and the old nation states largely irrelevant, organization has become built around the watersheds, collective networks that centre around Earth’s watersheds and hold the responsibility of nurturing and protecting a particular river system. The Chesapeake Bay watershed system that is Judy and her family’s home network gives us insight into how this might work, and it’s all about cooperation and working together to pool expertise and make collective decisions. The internet has been replaced by the watershed networks, which are particular to each watershed and are intentionally built around the network’s shared values, and people contribute based on their expertise, which gives weight to their particular suggestions on the shared threads that, alongside the algorithms built with the network’s values in mind, are used to come to consensus decisions. The health of the Earth and the good of the community are prioritized, with people working together to remove pollutants and monitor the health of the ecosystem. For everyone looking for a solarpunk schematic of how we might better organize ourselves to live with our planet instead of destroying it, A Half-Built Garden is an essential text. This is contrasted with the corporations, who are still motivated by profit at the expense of the planet, and NASA and the old governments, who have a utopian vision of human life among the stars but are frequently forced to compromise these visions because they need both corporate and watershed expertise. Emrys has clearly thought deeply about how these different approaches would shape both the organisations’ worldviews and the lives of the people who live within them, and these nuanced interactions, further complicated by the arrival of the Ringers, drive much of the complexity of the plot. 

A Half-Built Garden is a towering work of speculative imagination, and I have no qualms about declaring it to be one of the key works of science fiction of the past ten years. Emrys has created a powerful and moving novel that intelligently grapples with the issues our planet is facing today whilst boldly imagining the complexities and rewards of interplanetary interactions. Yet because of, not in spite of, its big ideas, the novel never loses sight of the personal and the mundane, of how these huge issues shape everyday interactions between people. It’s a fantastic reminder of everything science fiction does best, and a work that tentatively offers hope for the future in dark times. Read it now.