“A Half-Built Garden”

Ruthanna Emrys’s stunning First Contact novel.

A Half-Built Garden (published today) is Ruthanna Emrys’s new novel, a spectacular first-contact novel about complicated utopias and networked conflict — it’s a wild ride, and a perfect example of one of the smartest structural analyses of science fiction I ever heard:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210982/ahalfbuiltgarden

I got this analysis from my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, nearly 20 years ago, when he was giving me his editorial notes on my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it’s shaped everything I’ve written since. Patrick explained to me that an sf novel is like a piece of clockwork with two gears: there’s a small, quickly spinning, high-torque gear (the protagonist), and a huge, slow-moving gear that it propels (the world).

The protagonist is a microcosm for the world, and their job is to spin around and around, until they propel the world through a single full revolution, giving us a complete, 360° view of the social speculation embodied by the world.

One of the ways that an sf novel can go wrong is to have a mismatch between the protagonist and the world: if the protagonist gear isn’t a good microcosm for the world, the teeth on that gear won’t mesh with the huge world-gear, and the world’s…