said Carol. “It doesn’t mean they’ll use them the way we envision, or even in ways we’d approve of. You have to give gifts lightly — that’s one of my values. I’m going to tell you something.”
“You’ve been telling us things already,” said Phosphorus, I thought a bit sharply.
“Something new. We haven’t talked about it yet, because we didn’t want you to think that our genders work exactly like either plains-folk or tree-folk. Humans are kind of like your species, in that our genders aren’t set at birth. But it’s not completely uncertain, either. Parents can guess, and be right most of the time. Some choose to guess, and some don’t.
“My parents guessed. They gave me a male name, instead of one that could fit anyone, and when I realized they’d been wrong I had to change it. But it was okay, because the name was a gift given lightly. Because my parents loved what I was more than they loved their guess about what I’d be, they picked backup names in case I needed them, including one that fit my true self. And so I was still able to have that gift from them, and the relationship that goes with it, because they were willing to let me use it in a way they didn’t expect.”
A HALF-BUILT GARDEN, by Ruthanna Emrys.
Even this long quote doesn’t communicate how well the passage works in context, and I don’t want to share too much context. Suffice it to say that this isn’t only, or even principally, about gender; you can imagine any number of things that a human might need to talk about in early conversations with a technologically superior alien species, and this gets to the root of a lot of them.
I mentioned Cory Doctorow’s review of this book and noted something I liked that I thought the review had missed. It’s been enlightening, as I finished the book, to notice all the other genius things that Emrys has done to set this book apart from the tradition of first-contact literature and make it into a genuinely contemporary story. Doctorow of course has no obligation to mention every single thing I appreciated; the point is that there are a lot of reasons to love this book even if the idea of AI-mediated collaborative decision making, planet-breaking aliens living on Dyson spheres, and the other more classically science-fictional Big Ideas aren’t the kind of thing that lights your fire.
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has a nice review of A HALF-BUILT GARDEN (more thoughtful than anything I’ve written) where they compare it to Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, which is a book about a world split into 100,000-person “centenals” who affiliate into worldwide political parties, with the winner of the plurality of centenals taking a leading role in world government. It’s a parallel that I’m sort of embarrassed not to have noticed, especially given the primacy of machine learning in monitoring and maintaining both Older’s worldwide elections and Emrys’ dandelion networks. But one thing that’s always bugged me a little bit about the Centenal Cycle is the hand-waving around how it came to be. INFOMOCRACY focuses on I believe the third worldwide election under the centenal system, so the old world existed in living memory of most adults… but it’s never too clear how or why the old system ended and the new one began. Farrell draws an implicit contrast with A HALF-BUILT GARDEN: The rise of the dandelion networks is maybe a little less recent, but the motivations for it are much clearer, because they are a response to the legacy power structure’s failure to respond to the existential threat of climate change:
[D]emocracy should be linked to practical problem solving. Social scientists and theorists may fall in love with decision making systems for their own sake, but ordinary people very rarely do. If you want people to engage, they need to have practical consequences and benefits.
Currently reading: THE LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, Scott Hawkins
If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.