Book Thoughts: A Half-Built Garden
I had a minor crisis because of this book. Not because it was good, but because I felt it wasn't.
Spoilers ahead, but mostly about stuff that happens in the first couple chapters.
-A Half-Built Garden is a hope-punk story about a post-capitalist post-global-warming Earth where most people live in co-ops working towards healing the planet -- except for the "corpo" descendants of billionaires who are forced to live on artificial islands where they party and work and continue to scheme and try to skirt carbon laws.
Insecty matriarchal Aliens come to Earth, are mostly friendly (if a little passive-aggressive), and try to convince humans to leave Earth and join them in their cool space rings because "Technological species are doomed to destroy the planets they live on and need to expand beyond". The protagonist, who is in every way unqualified to represent humanity, declares "no, we can fix her", and drama ensues as different parties try to work with / against the aliens and other humans.
I don't know if this was the intent, but the book can be read as a scathing literary self-criticism of The Left -- of which I am strongly a part of, and thus stings the criticism all the more.
The protagonist's inability to make decisions without constant affirmation from their online network, the perpetual state of either angry or horny, and the obsession with one's pet politics in the face of world-altering events felt too familiar. The characters are so fast to cast judgement on the smallest imperfection while espousing acceptance and change and the greater good.
Our tiptoeing around the need to be perfectly in-line or on-brand can be paralyzing and it makes us unfit to fight bigger issues as we're so busy infighting and focusing on our little slice of righteousness. The world's falling apart because we, the caring left, push people away as a defense mechanism. We tend to alienate instead of educate because "it's not our job to educate you."
It is, though. Nobody's going to learn to love in a vacuum of hate and negativity. You can't educate someone who you've turned away.
Anyways, didn't like the book much. It was preachy in ways I didn't enjoy and brought a gender-politics knife to a first-contact gun-fight which was I was hoping would be interesting but ultimately felt misplaced.
I am grateful for it having gotten my gears spinning, however.