A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

So, off of last week's Multiple Authors Fail To Imagine A Compelling Jewish Future But Publish Them Anyway, we turn to a book where an author imagines a very compelling Jewish future, where a Jewish interfaith polyamorous family conducts first contact with two alien species.

I have Thoughts and they are disorganized, so, bullet points:

I must begin with a very serious tipping of my non-existent hat to this book. It does exactly what Countless Roads by nirejseki does, and that is have non-frum Jews with meaningful relationships with Judaism and Jewish ritual in their lives, in a way that is ground-in and completely unselfconscious. An important scene takes place at a seder!!!!! The Judaism is not pastede on yay. It underlies a whole lot of the worldbuilding. I do not think it is at all a coincidence that the alien species that the author writes puts a lot of cultural importance on people who ask questions.

Judy and her family keep a version of kosher, even though it's not the Orthodox version! She doesn't care about shechita, but she is careful not to eat pork or shellfish, and Even In The Future must deal with catered events where no one bothers to identify what's in the food. The book even has to pick from amongst the No Good Options for parental transliteration, and goes with Eema. What a mood.

And I go from this to a really minor complaint but one I have nonetheless: this book loses points for having a deeply forgettable title. I kept having to go check what the book was called, even glancing up at the top of the page to see the title.

And I have no idea why it's called a Half-Built Garden? There are no memorable half-built gardens in this book.

I also kept forgetting the title character was named Judy, since she isn't called by name all that much.

So I was snarkily referring to this as a Socialist Watershed Paradise when I started putting together my notes when I was about halfway through, but I do want to say: it's not that, and that's deliberate.

Because this isn't a book about how In The Future Everything Is Great, and it's not a book about Wonderful Transgender Paradise Where Everyone Is Happy And Gets The Hormone Therapy They Want, and it's not Once We Get Rid Of The Corporations Everything Will Be Perfect.

People are still people. Judy still experiences antisemitism growing up. She still messes up in recognizable ways and is struggling to do better. Her family is all working to be better and so is her society.

You still have to work with people you don't like, because they're still part of your community. There is no "kill the villains to fix the problem" in this book.

Okay and so. Here was my real distraction.

This is not particularly fair to this book, but I kept wondering where all the disabled people were.

Not in the world itself, but in their watersheds where everyone chips in on everything and everyone has their rotation on working on multiple things and some things seem marked to your "rep" on their online discussion boards, so if people don't like you, you don't get as much. You get the basics, but maybe not the extras? And if you just move there, you have to work to build up your rep and contribute to get the basics. And your rep is weighted and persists, so if people downvote your rep on something unrelated, you have less weight on areas of your expertise, on things that matter, because someone doesn't like something you said elsewhere.

So what about all the people who can't do physical labor, but everyone chips in on the farm? The ones who can't cook, but everyone takes their turn in cooking for events? And cleaning up and setting up for them?

Dinar has a prosthetic arm, which is great. And Judy has serious anxiety issues, compounded by the fact that she can't take some of her meds while breastfeeding. But where is the space for the chronically ill in this place? The ones who can't do everything? Is it enough that we do what we can, or are we marked down on our rep because someone needs to fill in on something and we're the next on the list, or Everyone Has To Help And You Are Everyone, and so on and so forth.

When what you get in life depends on how other people think of you, what happens to those of us who other people don't like, even in this better non-capitalistic world?

And this is... somewhat dealt with, in the larger sense? But Judy and her society rely so much on the wisdom of the algorithm but. But.

So, Dinar does gigwork for the corporations (we shall ignore how the corporations manage to survive as vulture corporations on artificial islands with only themselves as the labor to exploit), because she needs the extra cash. And people don't like her for doing it and are snide to her about it and mark down her rep, because she works part-time at an ideologically impure job.

And this is going to be a vicious cycle, then. People will take ideologically impure jobs to meet their mandated requirement goals of contributing to network resources or to be able to afford extras that aren't included in the basics (Dinar seems to do it for the first reason), and then lose their rep and their voice in communal matters because of their impure jobs, thus forcing them to stay at those impure jobs or take more of them to get what others won't now just give them because they're unpopular, they're contaminated by crossing the line and working for bad people, thus making them bad people by association &etc &etc.

And the ones running this system will say, well, those people can just take ideologically pure jobs instead. But how many of those are there, what skillsets are needed for them, and what is your currency aside from reputation, what is your economy, how does it all function, and who is falling through the cracks you create because you think everyone can be pure.

If people's ability to have their voice heard is dependent on them being popular, then there's a real incentive to negative-rep people you don't like, and the algorithm will support you.

Also, it seems like no one is pseudonymous on their Reddit That Controls Their Society And Decision-Making, which, again, that's not gonna go great in all circumstances for all people.

But hey, you get the basics, which seem to be food, housing, shelter, and medical care? I think? I am frankly not entirely sure what they consider to be the basics.

This may be a limits-of-POV problem, because Judy is happy with the status quo; in the final chapter where we finally dip into other POVs, we see from Tiffany The Former Corporate Techie that the other corporate techie is working on a subversive monograph on how the watershed folk signal their social hierarchy by the technological tagging of the origins of their clothing. Because, yeah. If everywhere you go, you're publicizing your name, profile, expertise, rep, and metadata information about your clothes and the sourcing of the cloth... that is important information and is definitely a social signal.

The one-upping possibilities in virtue signaling here could be really intense, especially since one of the characters can knit sweaters that can send radio signals. "Oh, your shirt wasn't crafted at home by one of your partners, made of fibers you harvested from your backyard garden, and spun at the local stitch and bitch, which your other partner catered? Oh. Forgive me, I thought you were sustainable."

There is nothing that can't be turned into a hierarchy.

My one time with quantified reputation was the FSUniverse message board, where other users could give you positive or negative rep, including leaving comments along with the rep (leading to my occasional bemused singing of "the lurkers support me in rep comments"). There were limits on how frequently you could rep someone, but not on how often you could be given rep. And you'd see it sometimes where someone would have positive rep and then make a statement people didn't like and suddenly their rep would start stacking red square upon red square. And people would see this rep every time you posted.

And if you saw someone with a bunch of negative rep, you don't know if they said something unpopular in, like, the politics forum, or if they were getting neg repped for liking the wrong skater in a rivalry. I never kept any lists, but I got neg-repped for some really weird things sometimes.

This is no way to run a society. This is barely a way to run a discussion board. You can have a magic algorithm all you want, it's still gonna cause problems.

You know all those books that are supposed to be So Great At Court Politics and So Great At Foreign Policy and So Great Diplomacy, and whatnot, and they just aren't? This book is. It does not bill itself as it, but it gets it so right.

I don't want to give the wrong impression; this is scifi democracy, not scifi monarchy. There's no court intrigue. There's no plotting. There's some inept spying by someone who does not know how to spy.

But oh my goodness, the politics of it all. So well done, so real.

From the afterword, the author seems to be involved in activism? It shows.

I think this book is a good example of how to have your kink/trope cake and eat it too. The author crafted worldbuilding where an alien society prizes motherhood and having babies above all else, and structures their society around it in such a way that being a nursing mother is apparently their highest social level. Judy manages to charm them immediately by being a nursing mother and that's how she ends up being the main ambassador to the aliens, despite having no formal training for it and despite not wanting to be the main ambassador.

The author manages to juggle this amongst a very trans-heavy book (in another "yeah, okay, sure, I guess" corporate worldbuilding: the corporates believe in constant social genderfuckery, apparently as a way to sell more clothes to themselves) and gets in a few remarks about how it's still totally fine not to be a nursing mother or a parent at all, and the alien society is the one to begin to shift and change. Is any character other than Judy and the NASA representative cis? No one knows, no one cares.

If I end up requesting this for yuletide, it's going to be for Dinar. I think she's the most complicated and interesting character and I'd love to know more about her background.

Regarding Dinar as well: it's really interesting me to me the light touch on the integration between the watershed network structure and the religious interpersonal networks.

Dinar takes low value work and is married to Atheo, who comes in from outside the watershed networks and was raised by abusive parents, so he has no birth family support structure. They have a young child and are looking for co-parents.

Judy and Carol were born and raised in the networks and have no issues integrating and are happy in it. But they want to raise their children with additional co-parents and kind of ran out of time to find htem. So when Judy is pregnant, they contact a shadchan, who is also representing Dinar, and the shadchan matches them as co-parents. Dinar and Atheo move in before Dori is born, so this is a quick process.

But how quick was that from Dinar's end? How long were she and Atheo looking for co-parents? Raven is a toddler, were they looking from before Raven was born?

And it is specifically a shadchan who pairs them up; it's not stated if the shadchan only connects Jews or not, but this is clearly a Jewish networking situation. And it helps Dinar and Atheo significantly within the watershed network, where one has low rep because of her job and the other is an immigrant.

I can tell this was published in 2022. It has a sea shanty in it. (Rolling Down To Old Maui, for those keeping score, lyrics adjusted to be gender-neutral.)

It's so nice to read a book that's happy to be about 350 pages, and didn't feel the need to pad it to 500. It could have padded to 400, though, the ending is somewhat abrupt on tying everything off.

Overall, a very good book, but do not think too hard about the economics or the supply chains.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I agree with most of this.

I'll say that the title is meaningful to me and it points to a lot of your latter comments. The Earth is the Half-Built Garden, because a half-built garden doesn't look like half of a garden, it looks like nothing, and the fundamental question is whether the gardeners have the patience and faith to finish building the garden or if they'll just try starting over and lose all their invisible progress. Which is the reason why a lot of the socialist paradise stuff is flawed and doesn't make sense, though I definitely felt a little unclear about some of the specifics, whether Emrys thought a particular thing I thought was nonsense was part of her deliberately flawed paradise, or whether it was something she actually thought was a good idea. Maybe the point is that reasonable people can disagree?

A huge point of the book is not only that reasonable people can disagree, but also even if unreasonable people disagree, you still have to include their input.

I just feel that if you have to darshen a title for it to make sense, it's not a good title.

I feel like if you have to drash a title for it to make sense, it's a properly Jewish book title.

I was almost overwhelmed with happiness at the not-frum-but-seriously-Jewish rep in this book! I think of it as more a collection of ideas than a solidly-built world, because while it made my brain fizz with joy & ideas that are too many bits where I felt like with one good kick my foot would go right through the scenery--supply chains, as you say.

The thing that made me most nuts, though, is that in the Big Debate at the end no-one argues that a diverse, natural ecosphere has any intrinsic value. And yet to me the idea that "well everyone knows you don't need more than 1000 species to have a stable ecosystem, anything more than that is cruft" is just ... scream-into-the-void nonsense. That *can't* be right, and any worldview that asks us to discard the rich webs of Earth life as useless is inherently suspect *to the max*.

I'm pretty sure that is Judy's argument.

What a thoughtful review, thank you very much. I was surprised by how much I liked this book--neither eco-fiction (if you can call it that) nor first-person narrators are usually my thing, but it got me anyway, and the Jewishness didn't hurt.

When what you get in life depends on how other people think of you, what happens to those of us whom other people don't like, even in this better non-capitalistic world?
This is a really interesting question and one that I did not think of. It also makes me wonder about the stresses put on family units by the system, the way the bad rep (literally and figuratively) of Dinar's gig work affects Judy and the others in their family group as well as herself--how often does someone say "I can't keep being married to you if you're still doing that" or "Mom (or Eema), I'm moving out because your bad rep is affecting mine," and so on?

If I end up requesting this for yuletide, it's going to be for Dinar. I think she's the most complicated and interesting character and I'd love to know more about her background.
I hope you do request it! Would love to read more about Dinar, and also I'd be just as happy with worldbuilding in general--the book does that frustrating thing of setting up the fascinating society of the watersheds, and then spending half its time away from there, on the corporate island or off with the aliens.

Yeah, the potential stigma of bad rep! And how sticky it can be and how it can be quantified, so instead of just be like "oh, I don't like their family", it can become "I don't like their family, and look, one of them has really terrible rep, that justifies my dislike." And one reinforces the other; if someone has good rep and you have a bad interaction, maybe you don't rep them down for it, because after all, everyone has bad days, and so that person maintains positive rep. But someone with negative rep is not getting that benefit of the doubt and so the neg-repping compounds.

Another frustrating aspect is I'm not sure what Dinar's last name is! I might have to get an ebook and ctrl-f to find it; I recall that her parents last name is mentioned but Judy and Carol hyphenate, so I don't know if Dinar hyhenates or even has the same name as her parents; one or the other (or all of them!) might have changed it.

Edited 2023-08-28 13:29 (UTC)

Another frustrating aspect is I'm not sure what Dinar's last name is!
I got curious and fished out the book, and then I got lucky and opened pretty much straight to it! During the corporate party, someone greets Judy and Dinar with "Ms. Wallach-Stevens, Ms. Naftali." So Dinar Naftali? (I think.)

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A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

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