A Half-built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Pan, 2022) is eco-SF set in the 2080s. By this time nation states and corporations have withered but not vanished, effectively replaced by the ‘dandelion network’ of fully participatory democracies centred on local communities.
It’s not a utopia by any means. The dandelion networks have created a warm, inclusive, egalitarian community but fixing the degraded environment they inherited is a constant struggle. Weather which used to be extreme is now normal thanks to global warming, and they have to keep on developing new food crops to cope with climate shift. (Ada Palmer’s back-cover comment that, “Emrys masterfully demonstrates how a medium-good future can send more chilling warnings than dystopia,” is spot on.)
And then the aliens land.
They come in peace, they say, but their perception of humanity’s needs doesn’t align with the dandelion networks’ aims. But this is fundamentally an optimistic book, so people of all body shapes talk it through and come up with a good consensus decision. This alone is enough to make the novel stand out from the crowd, and it’s a hugely welcome change from the standard “Aliens! We have to fight them!!” basis of so much SF and, indeed, human interaction.
I could stop right there, warmly recommending the novel to all and sundry, but would like to mention a minor caveat about it and suggest some further reading.
The first is that A Half-built Garden verges on what I called an “over-attentiveness to gender and ethnic inclusivity” when I grumbled about it in another review. Inclusivity is fine and highlighting it seems to be the current fashion; it only becomes problematic whan it begins to unbalance the main story.
The second is that the rise of the ‘dandelion networks’ exemplifies the ‘bottom up’ organic growth of anarchism as suggested by (e.g.) Graeber in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and demonstrated in present-day Chiapas, with the consequent fading of older institutions such as corporations and nation states. Emrys doesn’t spend much time on this but it’s there in the background. She is not alone in seeing devolution of power as a key to reforming the system; it’s an important aspect of Robinson’s recipe for a liveable world as laid out in The Ministry for the Future.
Becky Chambers, another new voice in SF, has a lot in common with Emrys. I’ve just read and enjoyed A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-built. The first of the series won the Hugo award for Best Novella and is perceptively reviewed here – npr.org/2021/07/18/1017119290/a-monk-and-a-robot-meet-in-a-forest-and-talk-philosophy-in-this-new-novel – on NPR.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is more of the same, really: the monk and the robot journey slowly together through a string of small communities, talking about how people make good lives. It is a welcome change from the endless dystopianism of much modern SF.
The NPR review doesn’t use the word “utopian” but it’s a fair description: if its strength is the positive vision, its weakness is a plausibility deficit.