Judy is out and about her ordinary business as an environmental chemist checking out water quality in the Chesapeake watershed. Unusually she has her wife and their nursing baby with her. Judy’s life purposes involve healing the earth from the ravages of pollution and global heating to make it safely habitable for her children. So when they discover the alien spaceship polluting their local river they immediately have a complex of issues to deal with. And it wasn’t exactly in Judy’s plans that day, or year, or even decade, to become Earth’s accidental ambassador to an alien civilisation, or to find herself, her family, and her community having to deal with the issues involved in the human race’s first contact with interstellar travellers.
The Chesapeake watershed is governed by a co-operative community that manages itself and the land and waters under its care using a dandelion network to communicate and make decisions. Dandelion networks are social networks to which all watershed communities have access, with tooIs and values built in to facilitate meaningful communication and good decisions. There are many co-operating dandelion networks managing most of the planet’s surface. There are also remnants of nation states and corporate enclaves that have inherited different modes of organisation and attitudes to the planet. There is plenty of human diplomacy and conflict to be managed and navigated while exploring the new possibilities offered by the alien presence.
This book is grounded in Judy’s life, her family relationships, the care of the children, her job, her community, her worldview, her care for the planet Earth and its future. Every decision she makes, every goal she sets, every encounter with others, must consider all of these. And of course the same is true for all the human and alien characters she encounters along the way, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Emrys handles all this complexity with a light touch, in lucid prose, telling an interesting story with engaging characters. SF stories often deal with these questions and dilemmas, but rarely is such complexity, so many possibilities and so much hope woven so deftly through a rollicking good read. I really enjoyed this book and will be nominating it for a Hugo next year.*
There is something else as well, that might not strike a new reader of today’s SF. I think this book is a very explicit response to Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel. That book, published in 1958, also told a story of first contact and humanity at cross purposes with an ancient and superior interstellar civilisation.
You may find this bit contains spoilers.
I think the key comparisons are these.
In 1958 Heinlein was writing for young adults, but in 2022 Emrys writes for adults. Both write in the first person. It’s perhaps not surprising that in Heinlein’s story human adults and their relationships play little part, and the story is very tightly centred on the adventures of geekish kids: teenage Kip and eleven year old Peewee. It does not surprise me when a modern writer follows suit (consider, for example, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series), but Emrys casts Judy as her protagonist, a busy woman juggling her many responsibilities in the heart of her community. The social relationships among the adult characters are not taken for granted but are challenged and negotiated even as the adventure unfolds, while the children are not traumatised, isolated and alone in their adventures, but are nurtured and cared for by their families and have their share in the story as the children they are.
Heinlein’s Kip and Peewee are child geniuses, unusual in their own worlds, unusually educated and skilled, and focussed on their own personal goals. Emrys’ characters are adults who work with their peers to deal with the complexity of the world and wield the tools needed to do their work.
We only ever meet Heinlein’s aliens from Kip’s and Peewee’s point of view; the aliens are essentially all powerful, and while Kip and Peewee have some autonomy, they have no power or status. Emrys shares the adventures and the challenges among all the participants, human and alien, and the equal significance of the individuals concerned is established from the outset. Moreover, the characters are not isolated from their homeworlds and communities, but engaged with them, acknowledging the complexity of their history, uncertainties and distrust as they learn to deal with each other.
Finally, and most crucially to my argument, both books culminate in a council where the future of the human race will be debated by the aliens over whom the humans have no power. Both place their human characters at the crux of that decision, with the responsibility to argue on behalf of the human race for their futures.
In Chapter 43 of The Half-Built Garden (a book of many short chapters) Judy walks out into the forum: “In a crisis, we still look for the big ape. So I’d imagined the Grasping Families as some prototypical council up on a dais, Shadowed spider and pillbug figures gazing down in judgement while I argued humanity’s case with a crick in my neck.”
And Heinlein, in the same place at the start of Chapter 11 of Have Space Suit, Will Travel: “We walked out onto that vast floor. The further we went the more I felt like a fly on a plate. Having Peewee with me was a help; nevertheless it was that nightmare where you find yourself not decently dressed in public.”
The basic argument is the same in both cases: humans have the right to determine their own futures; the aliens have no right to exercise their superior power to any other end. The contrast lies where it has lain for the whole book: Heinlein casts Kip and Peewee as witnesses with bit parts in an inter-species contest in which their future is incidental to aliens who have total power over them. Emrys’ characters of all species have been concerned from the first encounter with how they will relate to each other both ethically and practically, and Emrys, deftly, makes an altogether more complex set of arguments about mutual interdependence and self determination.
Perhaps the differences between the two books are a measure of the differences between Heinlein and Emrys, or between young adult and adult fiction, or perhaps between science fiction then and now. More likely a mix of all three. Whatever, this has been fascinating.
* I did nominate it for the Best Novel Hugo Award, but it didn’t make the short list. This review was written in November 2022.
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