I found 'A Half-Built Garden' a thoroughly unusual first contact novel with most of its divergences from the norm fascinating and some of them acutely refreshing. For a start, the aliens come to us. First contact is in the Chesapeake Bay not on an alien planet or in outer space. The majority of the characters here, both human and alien, are not male, which means that interactions don't follow a typical path. There are no guns, no standoffs and no tense posturing. Instead there's outreach, an abundance of conversation and a surprising amount of nursing babies, because bringing babies to negotiations is an inherent sign of trust. What's more, the aliens want us to leave our planet. They travelled all these light years to save us. I appreciated all these approaches.

I also liked the setting, because the author has shifted the balance of power in her 2083, through a long overdue realisation that the status quo has significantly damaged the planet. The U.S. is still a country and NASA send representatives to discussions with the Ringers, but corporations are an obsolete concept, literally exiled to aislands, whatever they are, like Zealand. They've adapted too, so, even though they're still driven by the bottom line, they've embraced renewables. The primary power where the aliens land is the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, which I'm not shocked to find is a real thing, created in the eighties.

Both the real and fictional versions are responsible for their particular watershed and ensuring it thrives. The difference between them is that these fictional versions, for there are many, have an autonomy, or close to it, in how they manage their particular environments. They're clearly set as the saviours of the planet and they're making a difference. The bad metrics are coming down and the good metrics are going up. It's working. And that just makes it even more of a slap in the face when aliens arrive to save us because their experience says there's no hope.

So far, so good, but I had some problems early too. For one, there's the mesh, wearable tech that's always connected to the network of the network, an unfortunate duplication of term. I get why it's important and I have no problem with it in principle, but it seems to be particularly advanced, all the magical powers of a tricorder in an even smaller footprint. The network it connects to is also a strange one, because it's far more comparable to Reddit than the internet as a whole. Given what it gets used for, I have no idea why it's so massively restricted. Sure, the threading logic is cool but I kept wondering why such an advanced tool was, in some ways, much inferior to what most people have in their pockets today.

As the book ran on, I started to wonder about where my sympathies should lie. Early on, they're all with the network, a set of honest people who care about the right things and, while they're wildly unprepared for their unexpected new role, they do their best. For a while, the hub of negotiations with our first contact aliens is the house of the family of Judy Wallach-Stevens. She sleeps upstairs with her wife and daughter, while their highly varied guests interact downstairs. That's new and it works on so many levels.

However, for people who are so honest and so well meaning, they have a real knack of coming out with inappropriate comments, some of them highly rude. That's real, sure, but hardly appropriate behaviour for the leaders of the planet's diplomatic mission to the universe at large, the role that is thrust upon them. It's especially inappropriate for people I have a feeling we're supposed to see as the epitome of tolerance. There's a lot of focus here on pronouns and alternative relationships, right down to a rather surprising new one that feels far too premature, and it's the networks who seem the most tolerant. Except they have their prejudices too and they get a little vicious, mostly but not entirely when directed at the corporation in Zealand.

I should mention here that there are points that I simply didn't understand but they weren't the ones that most readers might highlight. For instance, the people in the networks are overly fond of pronouns, but they tend to be he/him, she/her and they/them. They're easy to follow. When we find ourselves in Zealand, we learn that corporate types see gender as a private matter and would never dream of sharing it with anyone but their closest confidantes. However, they put on roles as easily as they put on clothing, which is a part of that, and each role comes with its own pronouns. That means that one person could shift between five or six sets of pronouns depending on which role they were adopting at a particular point in time, something others need to recognise. That's thoroughly confusing but it makes sense to people for whom everything is a game.

What I didn't understand was where some of the arguments came from. There are multiple points where characters, always women, are just talking and suddenly their conversation is an argument and I couldn't figure out where it came from. I re-read the preceding paragraphs and couldn't see anything untoward. The characters, however, absolutely saw it and reacted accordingly. That was a lot more frustrating than trying to follow a character changing from e/em/eir to tha/thon/thos, as they change from the holo role to the rasa role. I expected to be confused and I was. That was fine. I didn't expect to be confused in regular conversation between two women.

There are other levels that I probably missed too, though I followed enough to get the point. Some but not all of the watershed network people are Jewish, like Judy, who remains our primary focus, and there are layers of meaning that I expect Jews will pick up on. It was obvious during Passover, because of how opening your house to anyone who shows up has meaning here and fits the needs of the story well, along with very telling lines like "We should tell them that no matter what you do to us, we survive. And we remember who we are." I wouldn't have seen the Holocaust how Judy does here, but I can see why she would.

I wonder how much of this angle was designed and how much wasn't though. The balance between tolerance and intolerance ended up overshadowing substantial parts of the book for me, but that manifested a lot in where characters drew lines. The most tolerant people here drew lines around themselves that they simply aren't willing to cross and, in the context of the story, that translates to closed-minded thinking. However, I'm pretty sure that I should have seen the lack of ingredient labels on food at a party as more closed-minded than kosher dietary requirements or the rules of Pesach. However, Judy's able to instantly analyse the ingredients of food on a Dyson sphere in an alien galaxy but somehow not what's on a plate at a corporate function. That felt weird.

And so I struggled with this book. I found myself thinking how I'd make very different choices at an impressive number of points and about how unsympathetic the sympathetic characters often felt to me. However, I found a lot of the concepts presented utterly refreshing, even if they unfolded in a fashion that was maybe ninety percent talk. This isn't going to be for everyone but I wonder how many people that it ought to be for will have problems with it and how many unexpected readers will find it a thought-provoking gem. ~~ Hal C F Astell