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Notes -
(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.
let's see it
better than all but a few on /lit/. this is not praise.
this isn't good writing. it isn't bad. literally well-written, she has technical proficiency. it's uninspired.
i was going to ask you a section you found memorable, then i read a little more:
this is absurd. is there backstory explaining swathes of all human canon was wiped out? or the aliens have a ridiculous standard? or eventual clarification from the humans their picture is incomplete? if not and if the book has more insane lines like this, she's a bad writer.
Maybe the aliens used someone's porn collection to learn about humans? /s
But seriously, I think there is something to that. She's trying to say that a lot of fiction uses parenthood to do stuff like "Rob Schneider is both an X and a parent! And it ain't easy being both!" or simply ignores it the way it ignores shopping or sleeping or studying. Batman isn't a dad because he's a mogul by day and a crimefighter by night, when is he going to spend time with his children? And there's always Robin if Bruce wants to be a father figure for a moment. The aliens could be saying "oh, we didn't know humans actually spent so much time studying in college! We thought they just formed cliques, dealt with relationship troubles and aced through exams by using the powers of friendship and montage!"
Of course, this can be countered by saying, "how come these aliens who aren't that alien and understand parenthood don't understand the law of conservation of detail? Do they even have literature? Or do they just watch unedited reality TV feeds for entertainment?" Which a very good writer would have preempted by showing that yes, these aliens really don't have anything that resembles human literature. Or that they love children and parenthood so much they don't consider that "the boring part" of the narrative.
If motherhood is such a big deal for the aliens, then yeah probably it's an important part of "who the characters are" in their literature and popular entertainment. X has three kids (details about them), Y is pregnant (details about that), Z has no kids yet but is trying for them and so on.
The same way I skip over the pages of detail about exact model of gun and ammo and so forth when reading thrillers 😁 So far as I am concerned, Big Hero Dink Atsom has a Big Gun and is going to shooty the bad guys. That's as much detail as I need, but other readers (men?) seem to want all the details of what kind of Big Gun exactly and calibre of ammo etc.
Or the fashion details (for women) in bad popular fiction, where you get pages of description about what designer clothes, shoes, handbag, perfumes, etc. the characters are wearing. "Sylvia Shiny wore clothes - mostly coloured pale blue, today" is, again, as much detail as I need there.
Oh god, the shopping lists from The Girl that Played with Fire are coming back to haunt me. My pet theory is that when Stieg Larssen died no one edited his books past the first one.
My eyes glaze over at both the male and female versions of this because I don't know anything about guns and I don't know anything about fashion and I don't care about either. I don't know why a Horace de Latté ballgown and machine gun is better than a Sylvain Bompe-de-Bompe missile launcher and tea dress, and I don't want to know.
Whereas larger individual weapons do better with a less-refined leather aesthetic.
Yes, but will my mortar draw attention to my pear-shaped hips? How do I achieve a more balanced silhouette?
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