a critique of a book i liked a lot
i adore ruthanna emrys’ writing.
i first fell into it through her Innsmouth Legacy series (two novels and a novella so far), which reshapes h.p. lovecraft’s world in ways that i hope he would, after his definitive late-life turn towards antifascism, would have appreciated – and that i certainly do, for the changes she plays on the first and second red scares, on the many faces of u.s. fascism (and the pervasive xenophobia and eugenics that feed it) past and present, on the pleasures and dangers of closed communities and port cities. and her “the word of flesh and soul” made me fall even harder for the lovely and chilling things it does with the entanglement of words and bodies, sex and scholarship, archives and autonomy.
i’ve just finished emrys’ latest novel, “a half-built garden”, which is a first-contact story, a trans/queer/poly story, a climate-apocalypse story, a jewish diasporist futurist story, and even, in its subtle way, a monsterfucker story – and, according to its acknowledgements, has been (accurately) accused of being a “diaperpunk” story. it’s sweet, and tense, and very satisfyingly balanced between familiar and new. i enjoyed the hell out of reading it, and slowed down to draw out the pleasure.
i’m writing about it here because part of its power, to me, is as a very specific kind of cautionary tale – but in a way that i don’t think the novel itself sees. whether emrys does or not isn’t particularly important to me; i know very well from my own work that what i understand about and intend with a piece and what the piece understands and does have only a tenuous relationship.
there will be spoilers from here on, though i’ll try to minimize them; if you care, take care.
“a half-built garden” (HBG, from here on) shows us a world of sixtyish years from now, with states clinging to de jure existence, corporations surviving as high-tech industrial operations confined to “aislands”, and most of the planet’s humans structuring their lives through an ecosystem-restoration network of “dandelion networks” corresponding to each of the world’s watersheds, including the protagonist’s home Chesapeake Watershed Network. these watershed polities are, roughly, techno-autonomist in form: their core decisionmaking is done through algorithm-mediated voting that takes place within electronic discussion networks, with participants’ voices weighted by a mixture of “expertise” (never quite defined in the text) and popularity/prestige (never fully acknowledged in the text), and an additional layer of weighting of options according to “values” (explained in the text as in some sense “shared”, but with no explanation of how and by who they were defined or how and by who they could be modified). the software that does this weighting, and that mediates all discussion and decisionmaking, is in a very tangible way the thing that defines and controls the watershed networks – which is to say, the thing that exercises concrete sovereignty over these polities.
HBG presents this system as a pragmatically utopian vision of a future for humans on this planet: a way of structuring a global society to deal with the many kinds of damage caused by the capitalocene nightmare of climate change, warring states, and extractive industries that we are currently living through.
the novel, however, is a powerful argument against thinking of any such model as any kind of liberatory path.
at every point in its plot, the moments of danger to individual people and the moments of danger to human life on earth are direct results of structuring a society on algorithmic mediation rather than face to face contact, on software-based voting rather than shared direct decisionmaking, on software that shapes discussion on important issues and establishes which issues and voices count as important, on prioritizing efficiency over slow, repetitive cycles.
the watersheds’ corporate antagonists are able to nearly sink the entire future of human life on this planet because they are able to first (briefly) shut down the dandelion networks, then manipulate the weighting systems they rely on, and, finally, use these disruptions to make adopting their own network software seem an appealing “interim” solution.
the protagonist’s expectation of and reliance on near-instant algorithmically-mediated feedback from her network while acting as an (accidental, and not entirely willing) spokesperson and negotiator for its members, is a constant liability – whether it is operating properly (feeding her feelings of inadequacy in her role), cut off (leaving her isolated and unsupported), or being manipulated (giving her bad information to work with as well as undermining her relationships to others in the network, and her voice’s weighting).
and the problems caused by or/and affecting other characters are largely the result of these mediating structures and their dependence on them, from corporate baiting of watershed saboteurs to lovers parting without establishing a reliable means of communication.
every one of these dangers and problems comes from using these forms of algorithmic automation and mediation – and would be made impossible by not using them as the central infrastructure of watershed society. that possibility, however, is somehow never even considered within the novel itself, even where the network’s structure most blatantly shows itself as the place where an ostensibly liberatory project holds itself hostage to a commitment to massive resource extraction.
this isn’t unusual – it’s common to almost all forms of “fully-automated luxury communism” fantasizing, whether in fiction, polemic, or other genres. because HBG is, at heart, a FullAutoLuxCom novel, despite its degrowth appearance. and it’s one that shows off that fantasy’s contradictions in hyperdrive:
it imagines a worldwide effort to support and speed ecological rebuilding and stabilization and halt capitalocene climate change that is dependent on software that is clearly based on contemporary iterative-algorithm / LLM software (the most resource-intense code yet written, requiring an infrastructure based on vast, constant extractive efforts for its operation) running on a planet-scale communications network (again, necessitating vast extraction operations to build, operate, and maintain) reliant on technologies whose production as monopoly products is the reason predatory corporations still exist as powers in this world (where they are described as manipulating restrictive policies to maximize resource extraction, as well as tirelessly working to undermine the watershed networks) and shaped at various scales by community decisions about a “carbon budget” (a transactional framework specifically designed to preserve massive extraction industries and forestall calls for structural reductions in greenhouse gas emissions).
the few areas where we’re shown systemic changes – rather than shifts in which industries are the primary recipients of extracted resources – are almost entirely in the realm of consumer products: food is predominantly local; cloth seems to often be homespun; the objects of daily use and luxury display are to some degree artisanally made; materials have detailed provenance information coded into tags visible through the network.
the degrowth shown here means “no bananas”, but very much not “no coltan”. this may or may not add up to a possibility of better practices and results than today’s – let’s believe HBG that it does in very meaningful ways – but it certainly is not any meaningful motion towards the future of actual, structural degrowth that we need.
with all the AI hype of the past few years, it’s good to have this cautionary tale about relying on LLM-style software. i just wish HBG understood that’s what it is, and didn’t present itself, overall, as a celebration of exactly what it shows to be a combination achilles heel and trojan horse that nearly brings down watershed society.
to my eye, the combination lands – like FullAutoLuxCom generally – as an evasion of the challenges posed not only by the present moment of heightened crisis, but by the past 500 years of the capitalocene. these evasions share not only a conviction that the exact tools and processes that have destroyed the world as it was can be used to remediate the destruction, but also an odd commitment to keeping decolonization in the metaphorical realm. i don’t recall a nod to any type of indigenous community in HBG, despite its Chesapeake Watershed Network’s clear precedents in projects like the Indigenous Conservation Council of the Chesapeake Bay, and the ecosystem-restoration ethos of the dandelion networks as a whole being transparently indebted to indigenous activists and communities’ practice and writing. that absence in the book is striking, and i think very much connected to its FullAutoLuxCom core.
all of that said, my one real quibble with HBG is that in a narrative whose central question is whether newly-arrived extraterrestrials’ desire for symbiosis with humans will allow human life on earth to continue, or whether they will insist on “rescuing” the entire species by relocating it to their orbital habitats – and in which much is made of the extraterrestrials’ extensive knowledge of human cultural materials (gained from broadcast media) and of both humans’ and extraterrestrials’ specific interest in late-20th-century science fiction – nobody seems to have encountered octavia butler’s Xenogenesis series! this would be less odd if the beginning of butler’s Earthseed liturgy weren’t deployed by one of the characters at a pivotal moment. as it is, it leaves me wondering how many of the plot’s complications would’ve evaporated if someone had just said: “there must be akjai humans”.