Ruthanna EmrysReseñas

Thank you to dukedom_enough for explaining this story. I found it difficult to read and get past the language to understand it. There is a lot of discussion among the characters about childrearing. I was encouraged that in the future, people are concerned about it and have come up with some solutions. Even aliens are engaging in childrearing. I find that somehow comforting.

Took me a while because I've suffered from HPL malaise & overexposure to Cthulhu my this stuff. Despite that, the book has a slow start but once it finds its legs a few chapters in, this book takes hold & doesn't let go.

I never thought I'd be able to empathize with Deep Ones or worshippers of the Old Ones. This author & book proved me wrong. Great details that mesh Innsmouth & Miskatonic into history & geography alike. I'm eagerly awaiting the next novel....

The year is 2083. Judy Wallach-Stevens, while monitoring environmental sensors for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, sees a phosphate surge in the Potomac River. She heads out with her baby and her wife, expecting something routine - only to find an alien spacecraft, landed by the river. Baby Dori does what babies do, and Judy must change a diaper in view of the ship. The alien expedition leader emerges: shaped long and low, with many limbs, eyes on stalks, scaled - and she is feeding her own two babies from her body somewhat as Judy does for Dori. The "Ringers" are most insistent on including children in meetings and negotiations, and Judy has inadvertently passed the aliens' first test for humanity. Other tests will follow.

Much of the future Earth is organized into watershed networks like Judy's, conserving carbon footprints, intensively monitoring every environmental parameter, continuously improving their methods and knowledge of the Earth system. The watersheds are linked by the dandelion network, a social-media system optimized to promote expertise and consensus in online discussions. Despite a year-round hurricane season, too many extinctions, and a billion people dead in disasters, they think they are making progress toward saving the planet.

But the Ringers solved their own, similar problems thousands of years ago by abandoning their planets and building a Dyson swarm around their sun. Of the several planetary civilizations the two Ringer species have detected, the Earth's is the first that has not become extinct before their arrival. To the aliens, the lesson is imperative. Humans must leave Earth, turning it into building material for vast space settlements, starting soon.

The corporations and governments that wrecked Earth's climate are still around, their scope and power much reduced from our time. The corporations' responses to the Ringers' proposal are less Earth-friendly, aimed at restoring their former power, but also more in tune with the Ringers than those of the watersheds. The US Government also gets involved in negotiations, particularly NASA, still pursuing dreams of humans in space - and are those dreams really so bad? Meanwhile, the dandelion network has been hacked, and the best ideas are no longer foregrounded.

Community is the core of Emrys' story. The dandelion networks, comprising "...algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving...", support a view of the individual in society radically different from many that prevail today. Judy wants to operate with constant updates from the network, not with her own decisions - quite differently from SF's standard, heroic, lone protagonists. Beyond the networks, Judy's family and neighborhood, very progressive by today's standards, support her quest to save Earth by directly helping her, and by being a good place to live, where old prejudices have faded - two of the four adults in her household are trans, for example. A crucial plot turn occurs at a Passover seder.

The aliens have their own version of community. They originate from two habitable planets in the same star system - the second species are 9 foot tall, 10 legged furry spiders, sort of, who dwell in trees. A central metaphor for the paired species is their long-ago first contact, when the scaled plains-people reached the planet of the neighboring tree-people: "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." It's common for alien families to include persons of both species. Can Judy bring networks, aliens, and Earthly rivals to an understanding that leaves our planet intact?

These are Hal Clement aliens, really. Communication between us and them comes too easily, in service of getting to the ideas part of the story, just as Clement used to do it. The reader must make allowances here. One also misses discussion of the implied, unending, impossible, exponential growth that the aliens' system seems to aim for, which would be an obvious line of argument for Judy and her allies. And there's no mention of the Fermi Paradox, integral to thinking about intelligent life elsewhere.

Emrys has done a great job imagining a climate-stressed future that is not the usual doomscape. Even the corporation minions are not a straight-line extrapolation of today's conservative rich people - for example, their system of personal pronouns is way more complex than that of the watershed networks or anything today. And social media that amplifies facts and sound opinion, not lies? Tell us more. I rarely say this about a book, but this refreshingly optimistic novel could have benefited from being longer. Thinking about it was fun.

Ruthanna Emrys puts acknowledgments at the end for some of her inspirations for this novel. I rate it an extra half star for her friend [[Malka Older]]'s coining of the term "diaperpunk".½

You know the joke that starts "how do you know if someone is polyamorous?"

A follow up to the excellent Winter Tides, here we see the Mi-Go, the “Fungi from Yuggoth”, presented in a sympathetic light.

Turns out they’re people. People whose mission is to “talk to everyone”, to learn from any intelligent life, anywhere, and to introduce the people they meet to the true sprawl,of the universe.

Lovecraft’s Mi-Go seem hostile—tearing out people’s brains and po—ing them into canisters, where they can see and talk with the right technological accessories, but where access to those tools is subject to the whims of the aliens. Emrys’s Mi-Go, “the Outer Ones”, demonstrate a more positive plan—in general, they only take those who desire the experiences they offer, and they can swap brains back and forth between bodies and canisters.

They’re not unambiguously good, however. They can, and do, take people without permission sometimes. They’re also willing to do some mental manipulation when it’s to their advantage, and there are different factions whose plans for humanity clash.

Aphra Marsh and her confluence encounter them while searching for more relatives with Deep One blood, hoping to continue/restore the onshore community they lost in the Innsmouth raid. Both our friendly and less friendly FBI agents get involved, and old wounds are opened between the Deep Ones and the aliens. In the end, the tensions between regular humans, Deep Ones, and Outer Ones change, but remain unresolved. The Cold War lumbers on, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation continuing.

We may have managed to thread that needle thus far, with the peak and breaking point in the 1980s, but the threat remains, with newly unstable nuclear powers, including some we thought were out of the game, back to issueing blustering threats. At least the Deep Ones will (probably) survive the destruction of the surface world; the rest of are not so lucky.

I'm going to have to read this one again. This was a really challenging one for me, in part because found the protagonist's "Slack plus StackOverflow" decision-making culture to be, uh, way more abhorrent than the author probably thought I would. I generally disliked most of the characters, and I didn't think the aliens were alien enough, or it was too easy for them to achieve human cultural fluency. But in spite of all that, I still finished it and I still put the "i-recommend" tag on there, because it's just so unusual and so full of ideas. I'll read it again and so should you, if you're feeling open-minded.

Set fifty or sixty years from the present, in a world where the powers of corporations and nation-states are less important than today. a newer power center has emerged in the form of watershed-wide networks whose members work at healing the earth of the effects of pollution and global warming. Into this work in progress comes am embassy from an advanced civilization of two different alien species who come to rescue humanity. The story is both intimate and sweeping, imaginative and exciting. I'd give Ruthanna Emrys every award possible for this novel.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing story.

Interesting concept and good writing. Something about it just didn't satisfy me.

: Short stories, including some details from her Cthulhu-derived universe, where she explains that one reason The Shadow over Innsmouth inspired her was that it starts with a government raid, meant to read as reassurance that the authorities were paying attention, but if you start talking raids and camps, “I’m going to have some default assumptions about who the bad guys are.”

Eye-opening and quietly riveting. While it's built on a trope, the story rarely feels tricky or preachy. In fact, what made the book compelling is that the central character, Aphra, feels tremendously real -- her prickliness and sadness, her yearning, and her warmth in turns. The writing is gently baroque, a nod to Lovecraft, but it happens to perfectly convey Aphra's internal world, where every decision needs to be thought and rethought, where there's always someone who knows more than you do and won't tell, and where ancient wisdom is as real as the cold war. The writer does a wonderful job of conveying that tension. Excited to read more in this series.

Excellent.

Another Cthulhu collection, this one with a bit more of an esoteric occult feel to it. Particularly enjoyed "That Most Foreign of Veils" and "The Litany of Earth." YMMV.

Brilliant "First Contact" novel, the aliens arriving with the (reasonable) assumption that technological species cannot survive on the limited resources of their planet, and they've come to bring humanity to the stars.

Why I picked it up: Cory Doctorow recommended it during a presentation I was listening to. I can see why: the watershed networks are very much in line with what he imagines in "Walkaway" and "Makers."

Why I finished it: I was riveted by the idea of the dandelion network protocols, AI-empowered Reddit threads as a means of consensus governing. There were some small missteps, hints of story complications that vanished, but they were unimportant (and perhaps might be fodder for sequels, prequels, or side-novellas that Emrys has planned).

I'd give it to: I think this is notable SF, suitable for anyone interested in the latest the genre has to offer.½

I think this book is spectacular, in the very best traditions of near future speculative fiction, and absolutely fulfilling the promise of such literature to explore grave topics of great importance. I also found it weirdly distressing to read.

Things I loved:
A compelling portrait of our near future world, and the ways that environment and science might fuse to allow climate collectives to actively heal the earth + a really explicit conversation about the harm corporations do and the angst we all feel about why that is central to a lot of our cultures.
The way this tackles family, spouses, offspring and a type of mind blowing maternal supremacy.
The believability of a totally different type of alien contact.
Excellent characters who are complex and interesting and appealing.
Lots of pronouns, genders, family constructs, social games — it’s really interesting.
Well-handled character who’s missing an arm. Well handled because it doesn’t define her, she has tech that sometimes assists her, and on the whole it’s just an unremarkable part of her life.

The distressing — I think I just found the whole thing too believable, and it grieves me deeply to think of the damage we continue to do to the world. Also, one of the central tenets of the book is the assertion that all civilizations reach a point where they must use technology to abandon the limitations of planetary life — that there comes a point in species advancement where the choice is extinction of ourselves or our planet. The whole point of the book is to explore this idea, but somehow having it spelled out like that just devastates me.

Anyway. I think it’s brilliant, and I keep thinking about it.

A first contact novel set in the mid-near future discussing many different topics ranging from Global Warming to gender identity and colonization. Quite well written, although the motivation for some of the actions in the last section seemed somewhat less coherent at times, but given those specific ones were from the alien point of view, the author definitely has the last word on it. Following up on all the genders in the corporate world was too confusing for me.

Really enjoyed this book about first contact. Everyone is so happy and excited to find out we are not alone but everyone is talking past each other until they finally stop to figure out what it means to have a community with aliens from other planets.

File under: Respect rather than like. I respect Emrys' world-building, writing, and giving us a different take on First Contact. On the other hand, I'm not going to pretend that I related all that well to most of characters, and there was a bit too much minutiae of motherhood; though having never been a parent might contribute to that. I'm still happy to have gotten a new novel from Emrys.½

A Half-Built Garden tells the story of Judy, a woman who is part of a commune like community in the near future, who, with her wife and young daughter, are the first people to encounter extraterrestrials. They come in peace...but they also want humanity to abandon Earth to come with them to the stars. The rest of the book deals with the conflict of Judy's deep desire to stay on Earth with the pressure from the aliens and other Earth factions to take them up on their offer and migrate. From a plot/premise perspective, I liked this one, but the author seems very very sure of their stance that corporations are inherently evil, community decision making is ALWAYS best, single-family households will eventually fade away in favor of communal child-rearing, etc.... While I don't necessarily disagree with any of those stances (or at least don't disagree with them to the extent that I couldn't continue) there was an air of smugness about the writing that felt distasteful to me and made certain events entirely predictable to the reader.

This is my new favorite book! I want to recommend it to a bunch of people right now. I love the thoughtful picture of what a future for humanity could look like, the cultural differences and communication challenges with the aliens, the wonderfully diverse cast of human characters, the ideas about technology for building/maintaining community... There's just a whole lot here that's brilliant and well-done and desperately needed. And I love how the protagonist's values and decisions are rooted in her family, background, and community.

2 stars

Somewhat unsettling but not really creepy.
It also has a lovecraftian feel and all the associated sliminess.

4 stars

This is lovely.

The premise is more interesting than the execution, and the last third of the book started dragging for me.

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Gabra Zackman. Although I have some complaints, she wasn’t unpleasant to listen to and for the most part her narration worked for me. Her delivery had a slightly flat tone, which I thought kind of fit well, but I found it a little jarring with some of the character dialogue. I also had some trouble distinguishing between some of her character voices, but there were quite a lot of regularly-seen characters and the text mostly made it clear who was speaking, so it wasn’t a big problem. Probably my biggest issue was that I sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between the main character speaking out loud or thinking in her head.

Story
Although I didn’t realize it while listening to the story, this is based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. I learned this at the end of the book in the author’s notes. I’m Cthulhu Clueless, so all of that went over my head, but I never felt lost nor like I was missing out on important back story, so the author did a good job providing enough information for readers like me to appreciate it. I don’t know if that means that somebody who is familiar with it might get bored by too much information they already knew.

In this book there are three types of humans. “People of the Air” are regular humans like you and me. Well, like me anyway. I don’t know what you are. There are also “People of the Rock”, known as the “mad ones”. They are supposedly no longer around, but I know a lot of people I suspect may be related to them. The main character, Aphra, is one of the “People of the Water”, a longer-lived species that grows up living on land but whose bodies eventually transform and then they live deep in the ocean. Due to lies told about them, most of the people of the water who had still been living on land were killed, or died in concentration camps. Aphra and her younger brother are the only ones left. They’re asked by government agents to help them investigate rumors that a Russian spy has learned the magical art of body swapping. Since this is of some concern to them, and it also means they’ll be given access to some of their old and treasured books which were stolen from them, they agree to help.

The story has a very slow pace. It moderately held my interest, but I got exasperated at how little actual effort the characters put into their supposed objective. I mean, I get that Aphra and Caleb had ulterior motives and were interested in all their books, but their research methods, including that of the people who were more invested in the mission, seemed inefficient and haphazard. That part of the plot never really went anywhere, actually. Maybe it does in a sequel. I felt like the story had potential, and it had interesting moments, but I was never sucked into it.

I kind of liked the characters, they were mostly interesting, but I never got super attached to any of them either. There were quite a lot of them, but they were mostly distinct enough that I was able to keep track of who was who. What I did have trouble with, on the other hand, was keeping track of who was supposed to be in the current scene. It seemed like people kept cropping up who I hadn’t realized were there, or I just found myself wondering who was there in the first place. I’m not sure if this was because I have more trouble keeping track of the details when listening to an audiobook, or if things were unclear with the writing.

This will be a “probably not” for following up on the series in print. I liked it ok, but I think not enough to read more books in the setting. Someday I should probably read some Lovecraft stuff though so I can better appreciate its presence in modern literature.

Like everyone else seems to be saying, Emrys has both done her homework on Lovecraft, and takes it very seriously in her world building. I haven't yet read the short story that spawned this, but I'll correct that shortly.

Fascinating characters, fascinating use of—and progression of—the Lovecraftian universe. I've always said Lovecraft was a better idea man than writer, but Emrys jumps into his sandbox and builds magical castles.

Really looking forward to the next novel.