A Half-Built Garden

"A Half-Built-Garden is also far-future, and it’s a first-contact alien story. The main character works for a watershed collective on the east coast of the US, and they make first contact with the alien – not a president, not the government, and not the military, but someone involved in a watershed collective, with her baby. It turns out that the aliens also have their babies with them, so the fact that the first human they contact has her child with her helps them to connect the two species: they have something in common, because they’re both caring for their young. So it looks at first contact in a very different way to most science fiction. We tend to think of first contact in a very colonial, patriarchal way, which mirrors first contact between Europeans and Native Americans , for example, or other colonial circumstances from our past where people clashed very violently. This book looks at it in a very different way. This world is definitely not entirely utopian, but we have moved the trajectory of the world for the better, to a more sustainable and just society. The aliens come to Earth in this book because they heard that humans were destroying the planet, and they want to take the humans away and let Earth heal. The conflict comes from that: some people want to leave, and some people want to stay and continue helping to heal Earth, and not just abandon it – they want to be part of the ecology of Earth, because humans are part of the ecology. We’re not separate from it. The book is about that balance between human progress and innovation, and natural processes. It’s a very worthwhile read. Another Life takes place in a solarpunk community, a peaceful eco-village in Death Valley, California. The conflict revolves around a new piece of technology that allows people to learn who they were in a previous lifetime. My character, Galacia, takes this test, which is essentially like a DNA test, and learns that she was a very horrible person in her past life, and someone who had directly affected many people in her community: a man named Thomas Ramsey. Ramsey had proclaimed that there was a Planet B, and he could build the ship that would get them there. But it was all a scam; there was no Planet B. This scam led to a whole collapse within at least the United States – it probably extends beyond that, but certainly within the United States. Once Galacia knows this about herself, she has to grapple with that dark knowledge and see how the people around her react to it. One of the things that I’m grappling with in this is the foundation of a violent past that we all have to live with. How do we build something better from a violent, unjust and unsustainable foundation? How do we take that and turn it into something better? The characters have created a small quasi-utopia. It’s definitely not the entire world, or even the entire country. It’s just a little piece of something better that makes a big difference to the people who live there. Yes, it’s almost impossible to get away from that. Once you start looking at the history of corporations, the history of anything, it’s very difficult to get away from that problematic beginning."