Half-Built Garden

A book about communicating, consensus building, gender and all sorts of fun stuff...

Funny and light hearted while being deep cannot recommend this highly enough

There's really a lot to like here for fans of Story of Your Life/Arrival, Becky Chambers, and/or Adrian Tchaikovsky. I particularly like this take on the nearish future of technology for communication and community decision-making.

I felt like it got a bit preachy at times around the subject of distributed consensus governance, but this is a minor, subjective nitpick.

I get so tired of the narrative that humans are always going to choose the worst and most selfish means of planet stewardship, and this book is tired of it too! It’s one of those novels I put down and immediately begin longing for its vision of the future’s so badly it feels like I’ve lost something tangible. How much time do we have to get the watershed networks and dandelion networks underway and beat back the corporations? I’m ready to meet some aliens.