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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.
Best burn I've read in a while.
I... I just can't do fiction written by most female authors. I wrote before how in a mostly male dominated Battletech fiction library, a female author snuck into a short story compilation. It was immediately obvious. I got 4 pages in before I had to thumb back to the table of contents and check the credit.
There are a grab bag obvious tells. Long introspective monologues. Often a touch of female chauvinism around motherhood. And of course all the characters emote like a knitting circle full of menopausal aunts. But undergirding all of it is an undercurrent of neuroticism that utterly stifles anything from actually happening. I'm not even talking about big fancy testosterone boosting action sequences. I mean even simple causality flies out the window. Things happen, characters feel. More things happen, with no one exercising any agency what so ever. More feelings. Something resembling a conclusion occurs, but I can only tell because the book is almost out of pages. Once again, without anyone exercising any agency at all. Some more feelings end the... story? Is that a story? Or was it a therapy journaling session?
I can't do it. I simply cannot do it. I refuse to read fiction by women. Frankenstein gets a pass, and that's about it.
Please stop writing this to what you presumably hope is a sympathetic anti-woman audience who won't laugh you out of the thread, instead go and read Patricia Highsmith, Donna Tartt, Hilary Mantel, Robin Hobb and Gillian Flynn and report back.
Please stop telling people what to write or not to write - and you are engaging in the same kind of consensus-building you accuse him of.
Several people have already said pretty much the same thing you did ("this is a bad opinion" followed by recommendations for women writers) without sounding like someone from reddit coming in to wag their finger.
Oh, I guess I am coming in from Reddit to wag my finger. I did consider fully disguising my feelings beneath a more constructive-sounding comment but I decided it would be dishonest; frankly, I was motivated to respond to the comment by a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of the comment, so I wanted that to come through at least a bit. (I am perfectly happy to abandon this forum if such things are taboo'd here? Let me know.)
Expressing "a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of [a] comment" is taboo here because it doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. This is an anonymous forum; none of your friends will be outraged that you tried to engage a neo-Nazi/incel/paedo-fascist constructively instead of dismissing them without a second thought.
Realistically, a large proportion of the users and comments here are bigoted by the standards of Reddit. If you're going to post something that amounts to "yikes, sweaty" under one in every 3 or 4 comments, then you should leave, for your sake and ours. But I believe a constructive and mutually beneficial discussion can be had as long as everyone sincerely tries to "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". If you can do that, I urge you to stay. We could use more ideological diversity.
I mostly agree with the policy as far as it applies to completely informationally empty comments. I would say mine was one part salt and one part recommendations of really good authors, however, and was actually mostly well intended (I wanted to make the poster think, "I have gone too far, I am grossing this other commenter out, maybe I need to go and get some different experiences, such as reading the authors they mentioned."
I suppose one danger of this no-expressions-of-distaste policy is that it could leave posters unaware that they are causing contempt/disgust reactions in others. Though to be honest, in the case of someone given to generalisations of the level 'I will not read books by women', said posters are probably getting that feedback elsewhere in their lives anyway, even if they are unable to receive and act on it constructively.
The original comment could have been phrased better, and perhaps criticism along those lines would have been more acceptable to the admin above. However, it seems your objection is not to the comment's tone but to its content. I agree that the near-total dismissal of female writers is based on ignorance, but the correct response is a counterargument, not finger-wagging and pearl-clutching.
The comment's author has now received many suggestions of writers whose works may change his mind. Surely you agree that this is a good thing. But this is only possible because he posted his comment. The alternative is him not posting anything, and hence not getting any recommendations, and hence remaining ignorant. Surely you agree that this would be a bad thing. Therefore, it makes no sense to scold him for posting the comment. Your comment, even if well-intended, was counterproductive.
This forum's rules are the way they are because its purpose is to facilitate free discussion, and we want free discussion because it is the only path to progress. Self-censorship cannot eliminate incorrect or disagreeable beliefs: at best, it will hide them; at worst, it will cement them.
I admire your attitude, but don't see it quite that way. If he was posting in good faith, then yes, he got recommendations and his ignorance is ameliorated. Hurrah. But if he's not, and was rather hoping to garner emotional reward from the rise and attention he gets out of people, or their sympathetic and confirmatory anti-woman posts, then engaging with him is just entertaining him.
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