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Becoming Radicalized by the Hugos
A Very Culture Warrish Review of A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
In which my fellow nerds will recognize the battlefield and everyone else will roll their eyes and not know who the fuck these people are.
Wordy Pretentious Preamble About My Reading Habits
Everyone remembers the Sad Puppies affair (and the sequel, the Rabids), right? It's been covered here (well, at the old place) before. At the time, I admit to some schadenfreude at the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I thought Vox Day and Larry Correia were making entirely too much of the fact that phallic rocketship stories don't win Hugos anymore. I actually read some of Vox Day's "Hugo Nominated" fiction. He is… not a good writer. I enjoy Larry Correia, but it's bubblegum bang-bang shoot'em up wish fulfillment, which is all well and good, but the same caliber as Ian Fleming's writing – entertaining and marketable and would make for great movies, but not really, well, whatever the Hugos used to represent. Ditto Brad Torgerson; serviceable prose, but fanzine-level execution.
As for the three Johns (Kratman, Ringo, and Wright), I've read all of them, and Kratman and Ringo tell rippin' good yarns with execrable prose and plotting. Only John C. Wright is actually a really good writer (though he does get a bit up his own ass, especially since his conversion to Catholicism).
I'm just saying, if the right wants to reclaim any creative spaces, they need to find better creatives.
Conversely, I used to really like John Scalzi. I watched Vox Day beat him like a pinata online, and though I hadn't gone full anti-SJW yet, I started to think…. "VD is right." His cruel but accurate takedowns were intensely petty, spiteful, and personal, and yet he had the squishy little man pegged.
Scalzi has since become ever more pretentious, ever more virtue signaling, ever more… well, VD would say "effeminate," I'd just say I started to recognize the sight of someone rolling over to show his belly, someone desperate to stay in the good graces of a clique where being a straight white male who cites Heinlein as an inspiration means he's always one bad Tweet away from being consigned to the outer darkness. My fondness for his books curdled, as I started to see his smarmy potato face in all his characters.
As went Scalzi, so went the Hugos, where for the past few years it seems like there's a little bit of straight white guy affirmative action so that John Scalzi and Clarkesworld can stay relevant, but basically it's a women's fiction award now, and if there's ever a white dude-dominated slate again (yet alone a white dude-dominated winners' list), Worldcon will burn.
And ya know, I don't hate women's fiction, or women in SF. I really am an omnivorous reader. But over time, some things have become hard not to notice. Like the fact that N.K. Jemisin is a fanfic-level hack who's fawned over and feted and cooed adoringly as the next Octavia Butler (she's not). Like how Kameron Hurley and Seanan McGuire and Ann Leckie are all decent writers but such insufferably hateful harpies that, like Scalzi, I can't stand to read them anymore.
Vox Day and the alt-right say "Don't give money to people who hate you," but I am not alt-right and have remained determinedly apolitical in my media consumption. But gods help me I'm becoming one of those guys who side-eyes anything written post Great-Awokening by a chick.
Which brings me to…
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys
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.
I know, I know, I should have paid more attention to that blurb.
I picked this up because it's a First Contact story that got batted around as some new hotness in SF, and I like alien stories with a modern perspective that are more original than "How will we repel the invaders?"
(I like alien invasion and other MilSF stories too, but like I said, I am an omnivorous reader.)
A Half-Built Garden is very likely going to wind up on the Hugo shortlist this year, and probably has a decent chance of winning. It's a well-written, creative story that brings some interesting ideas to the table, it's innovative science fiction…
.. and it's also a meandering, actionless piece of women's fiction dwelling on pronouns, interstellar consent culture, lactating breasts, and internal monologues that all but drowned me in estrogen.
I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).
A Half-Built Garden is "Aliens arrive, people have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end."
(1/3)
(2/3)
The Bitter Review I Would Not Post on Amazon
The year is 2083. Earth's climate has suffered and we're not out of the woods yet, but the world is finally getting its shit together enough to undo some of the damage.
There are basically three factions in the late 21st century:
Environmental Cooperatives, sort of NGOs on steroids who have vaguely-defined authority over most environmental concerns and are doing the actual work of repairing the environment. How exactly they obtained their authority is never really explained, but presumably it's something like "Everyone finally realized we're all going to die if we don't listen to the environmentalists." Okay. They have lots of virtual meetings and talk about species and ecology preservation, carbon emissions, virus containment, and weather forecasting. They invented this whole new kind of networking called the "dandelion networks" which are kind of like Twitter except very peaceful and everyone reaches a consensus and they are resilient against disinformation and wrongthink.
Governments. The old nation-states (including the USA) are still around, creaky old dinosaurs who are kind of obsolete except they still have armies and nukes so you can't exactly ignore them. When the aliens arrive, NASA is ecstatic to become relevant again.
Corporations. When the environmental cooperatives effectively took over the world (it's never put this way, but it seems like basically they run everything and the governments with… armies and nukes just… let them) the corporations had the choice of getting with the program or fucking off to their own micronations. They decided to fuck off to literal and/or figurative islands. So the remnants of late-stage capitalism now exist in little "aisland" enclaves of their own where everyone plays status-seeking corporate reindeer games while trying to stay relevant by offering goods and services to the environmental cooperatives and governments. They aren't literally given black hats but the author's voice heavily implies they are bad guys who want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth. (Spoiler: They are the bad guys and they want to go back to the bad old days of despoiling the Earth.)
Aliens Arrive!
They land on the Maryland shore, just outside of Washington, D.C., and are stumbled upon by our first person POV protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens, a Jewish lesbian who lives in a large manor house with her polycule, including her wife and their infant daughter, a they/them, and a transman (who have a they/them toddler of their own whose gender is pointedly never specified). Judy does ecology stuff for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, but mostly she cooks. She seems like a really interesting and original char-
… okay, well, Larry Correia writes himself as his MC too, so anyway.
Judy and her wife happen to be carrying their infant daughter while out for a stroll, and this turns out to be significant, as the aliens are matriarchal and bringing your children to diplomatic negotiations is a sign of good faith. So by sheer coincidence, while baby and hir two mommies are staring at the spaceship that landed on their front lawn, they have initiated peaceful contact with their visitors, who respond in kind by sending out one of their own with her children.
Or Hor or Its or Zis… this book was full of neopronouns, though actually the humans were more varied than the aliens.
The "Ringers" are actually two species, who made contact with each other ages ago. Since then, they have searched the galaxy for other intelligent races, and found mostly dead worlds where civilizations once existed. It turns out that most races fall into an industrial death spiral: their technological advancement outpaces their ability to manage their environment, and they all wind up making themselves extinct. The Ringers avoided this by going into space, treating their homeworlds as mere raw materials, and have thus concluded that intelligent species are not meant to be planet-bound. When they picked up radio signals from Earth, they sent an expedition to save us.
This is the central "conflict" of the story: the Ringers believe that humanity has to leave Earth or die. Judy and her eco-coops insist they're actually fixing their world (yes, the whole book is literally a Tikkun Olam meme), but the Ringers claim that Earth is already doomed.
I put "conflict" in scare quotes because it's implied that the Ringers might try to force humans to leave Earth. Except.. other than a few tense conversations where Judy says "What if we don't want to?" and the Ringers say "But you have to!" there's never really any kind of threat. The Ringers sent a diplomatic mission, not a warship, and while there's some talk of nanotechnology and how the Ringers could conceivably start disassembling Earth right out from under us (they are apparently advanced enough to have started building a Dyson sphere back home), there's never any indication that this was actually something they had in mind. They just sort of assumed they'd explain the situation to us in a reasonable manner, and humanity would agree that their solution makes sense.
So all that is interesting enough as a setup. The rest of the book is mostly about the nation-states and the corps and the coops all jockeying to influence the aliens, while the aliens are playing politics in return. Eventually Judy and her wife and child and some corp reps go to the alien home system, there is a bit of nefariousness, but nothing that can't be solved with impassioned speeches inspired by Star Trek (literally).
And that's pretty much it. There is a lot of talking and soapboxing. Every conflict is solved by talking and being more empathetic.
The first is when Judy is invited to visit one of the corporate "aislands" with her new alien friends (who insist on Judy coming along because having made the proper initial diplomatic overtures, they consider her to be Earth's spokeswoman, more or less), and she brings along a weapon that will DDoS the corporate networks. See, the coops' computer network was almost taken down by a virus, which they are pretty sure was caused by the corporations, so Judy's activist parents from a radical Jewish commune cook up a poorly thought-out plan to stick it to the corps. But the whole time Judy is carrying the device around in her pocket she's feeling really bad about using it and feeling sorry for all these capitalist planet-rapers who are, after all, still people just like her. Then one of the capitalist planet-rapers detects the device in her pocket and they talk it out and Judy hands over the device. Then they go to a party and eat lots of food and Judy and the aliens go back to Maryland.
Later, there is another conflict where some of the coop folks want to sabotage the aliens' communications gear. There is some scuffling – someone actually uses a judo throw on someone! Judy lectures everyone about what an immature species we're being. They talk it out.
Finally, they go to the aliens' home system, and the aliens and humans argue a lot, and then the humans demand that they not be "colonized," and the aliens recognize their demand for affirmative consent. They talk it out. The end.
Sigh.
(3/3)
DEI…. in Spaaaace!
You've already picked up all of the major Culture War points, but I cannot emphasize just how very, very much a product of a bonafide card-carrying SJW this book is.
Pretty much everyone is queer and/or genderfluid and/or female, except (you guessed it) the unambiguously villainous corporate types (the ambiguously amoral corporate types are genderqueer, and the sympathetic ones are female) and a few government drones. Oh yeah, and the aliens. The male aliens get to be likeable, because the females are in charge.
There are multiple conversations about pronouns and nametags. A minor plot point is that the aliens are matriarchal and so it matters to them who actually gives birth, and Judy's transman housemate is really upset that she didn't put her foot down when the aliens were asking hurtful questions. We also learn that her transman housemate was (of course) abused and almost driven to suicide by bigoted parents who live in one of those conservative enclaves where people are still technophobic, transphobic, and religious.
The wrong kind of religious, I mean. We get multiple digressions about Judy's Jewishness. Growing up in an ultra-leftist Jewish commune, one of the defining moments of her childhood is that some asshole kids drew swastikas on her schoolbooks. In the 2060s. At the corporate-hosted reception for the aliens, she stands around angsting about whether the food (made out of corp-paste or something) contains shrimp or pork. And there's a long talk with the other human mommy in the book (I'll get to that) about the Holocaust. See, the governments and corps put on a display to summarize Earth's history for the aliens, and Judy is very upset that they didn't mention the Holocaust. Like, very upset, in tears.
I don't care about a lot of the woke shit and the neopronouns. I mean, realistically, transpeople are not going away. A writer who writes a story set in 2083 that isn't post-apocalyptic might try to wave away genderspecials as a fad that died out in the 30s, I guess, but otherwise, sure, they are probably a part of the landscape for the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.
The character is Jewish and Jewish identity (and anti-Semitism) is still Very Important in 2083 - okay, I'll buy it. Our resident Joo-posters I'm sure will have much fun with this, but I mostly shrugged it off, other than, ahem, noticing it. Yes, I did also notice that no one else gets to be religious and not a backwards technophobic asshole. (The aliens have some sort of "spiritual but not religious" thing going on and they even have what I suppose is supposed to be a touching scene with Judy and her transman housemate. The alien wants to do a ritual, Judy can't because she's afraid it might violate her own religion, so the transman, after carefully questioning the alien about what exactly their beliefs entail, overcomes his childhood religious trauma to participate.)
There's also a sex scene. With an alien. Judy (the lesbian) falls in love with one of the male aliens. He's such a good talker and such a good listener, you see. So she discusses it with her wife and they agree to invite the alien into their polycule. This is before they've decided whether to actually have sex with the other humans in their household. But they have a very serious relationship talk with the alien in which they say hey, we kind of like you, and he says well, I kind of like you too, and then they have a threesome.
So human dick is out of the question, but two lesbians are totally DTF with a headless alien spider-thing who is male enough to make hentai jokes.
Even that didn't really squick me much, though. (Larry Niven was writing about alien sex in the 70s.) What did squick me? What made me want to DNF it? (I did finish it.) The many, many, many fucking mommy moments. Yes, I get it, the author is trying to make mothers important characters, not like groty old white dude engineers. Lactating women (and aliens) will save the world.
Judy and her wife literally change a diaper at the moment of first contact. We are constantly treated to descriptions of Judy nursing, how her breasts are feeling, taking nursing pads out of her gear, checking medications for nursing safety, hey, did I mention yet that the main character is a nursing mother nursing throughout the book? (So is the alien girlboss in charge of their expedition.)
One of the other characters, who is so brilliant and important that she's called back from leave to help talk to the aliens, is a NASA engineer who's also a nursing mother. She and Judy talk to each other about aliens and the sociological ramifications of Star Trek captains (yes, seriously) as they "gently sway in sync" while nursing their babies.
Like, hitting on this once or twice would have been an interesting non-traditional perspective. Hitting it as often as Emrys does, I started expecting the book to lactate.
If a man wrote this, we could probably call it a fetish.
The greatest sin of A Half-Built Garden as science fiction is that it turns the entire saga of mankind's (hah, see what I did there?) first contact with aliens into a bunch of table talks about boundaries and consent. And I mean this literally, in every sense – one of the big table talks is on Earth, where the aliens come to Judy's Seder gathering. There's another on a corporate "aisland" (the one where Judy is worried about whether corp-food is kosher.) The last one is in the Ringers' home system, where besides asserting their right to self-determination, the humans lecture the aliens about their wrongbad gender essentialism and explain that humans aren't actually sexually dimorphic and give a speech about gender fluidity that could have come straight out of a LGBTQ+ DEI session. At the end of this speech, one of the aliens comes out as nonbinary (no, I am not making this up), and then we get the big reveal that Judy's wife is, in fact, a transwoman.
Congratulations Earthlings, you've spread ROGD to the stars!
For all my snark and bitterness, the real crime here is that Emrys is not a bad writer. The aliens are genuinely interesting (and alien), the situation that she sets up is plausible and has plenty of potential for actual conflict (which does not have to be armed), and I have to admit that her prose was above my usual expectations for SF&F. A less hyper-woke writer could have written a pretty good book. Instead, she wrote a Hugo-worthy one.
To borrow Evola's vocabulary, this is lunar civilization porn.
One couldn't write a more authentic parody of a world dominated by the feminine principle if they tried. All of it is there: materialistic and decadent, based upon money and sensuous pleasures, and lacking even in the contemplation of the possibility of violence (even, action) as a reality of the human condition.
The temptation of course is to just let it rot in the garbage bin of history as the sycophantic drivel that it is. But anger and reaction, though cruel mistresses in everything else, are powerful muses.
I wish I had the talent to infuse this world with a good dose of solar Heinlein and write the story from the other side of the bayonets. Because while your political lesbian MIT graduates are having interspecies sex and playing at carbon neutral inclusive and equitable court intrigue whilst swapping tips on how to be a smothering mother with our alien oppressors, you know someone, somewhere, is dying in a ditch actually fighting for something they believe in.
Who are they? What's their story? Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.
This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.
As vain as it is to say when it comes to aesthetics: I disagree.
I pride myself on being able to appreciate both Hard Boiled and Pan's Labyrinth which are sublimations of the respective metaphysical tendencies.
The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art. I think lunar science fiction is a contradiction in terms in the same way that you couldn't make a lunar action movie or a solar romantic comedy (or if you can it's definitely a tour de force).
If you manage to sublimate sensation to the degree that you transcend your setting, you are not writing science fiction. You are writing classical literature that just happens to contain spaceships.
My criticism of this particular work isn't so much that it is lunar at all, but rather that it is so unabashedly and inappropriately lunar as to be perverse. And that is a failure. I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.
Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.
If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...
... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.
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