A Half-built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

I am going to visit leaflemming except I'm waiting to hear the result of my flatmate's covid test (is the fact that they can't taste the ginger in the ginger chocolate we have a cause for concern, along with their sinus symptoms? Probably not! However.)

Over the course of having a really annoying (non-covid) throat infection these past weeks, media which sustained me included:

1. A Half-built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

The hard work of fixing climate change has begun. Where Terra Ignota posits non-geographic nations, this book has even more geographic nations, risen through slow organisation and revolution, whose remits are determined by the watersheds they monitor and care for, regardless of previous arbitrary national boundaries.

But this is a first contact novel. The aliens land by chance in one particular watershed; but they land, also, on a planet none of whose old powers have gone away, and all of whom want a piece of the future the aliens offer.

Some narrative dislikes of mine are in this book - the protagonist spends a long time vacillating over a choice which had me peering out between my fingers shouting "No! No! Do the other thing! Don't do this thing!" and in general I am slightly agonised by the book's commitment to people making poor decisions under pressure. Something in this territory may be why I read Winter Tide with enjoyment but never wanted to pick up the sequel. I'm going to pick up that sequel now, though, because the things I liked about this book I liked so much. Especially its imagined future of work, the algorithmically-mediated network voting system the watersheds use - quietly as augmented-reality as it needs to be despite having none of the corporate aesthetic - which weighs votes against the community's pre-established value sets, and assigns representation to rivers and forests, where the flipside of people's tendency to make mistakes under pressure is a system which can tolerate any individual mistake. I really really want to work in one of those. (In fact, reading about it helped me understand why I have these several years been looking at the prospect of getting a full-time job and responding with white noise, avoid, avert).

( Some spoilers )

I also really like the way the book complicates the idea of having a protagonist with its intermissions, small glimpses of outside perspective, was really good - minimal, yet effective in showing that the main characters don't have a privileged position in events, that the degree to which the book can have main characters is itself a sign that times are strange and norms disrupted. And the diplomatic importance of babies was great, and the non-monolithic future of gender - you can see current gender expression culture evolving in two different ways, and the aliens have their own non-monolithic stuff going on.

And now my flatmate has tested negative for covid! And so, to be cautious, have I, so I am setting forth without writing about the thing I was watching during my throat-infection-ness: Andor, a series which I've been gleefully following along with episode by episode beside the crew of the podcast A More Civilised Age. (Such good designed environments, such acting, such zingy dialogue, if you are fully tired of charming rogue dudes this might be one to miss but he has a good cast of people who are agentive and not rogues and not dudes, and, and, enthuse enthuse, okay leaving house now)

Babel, by R.F. Kuang

A boy is dying of cholera in nineteenth century China. Unlike other boys of that description, a British magician finds him useful - so his life, and only his, is saved. He is taken into the machine of British imperialism, raised as a translator between languages - because the magic which runs Britain is derived from the gradient of translation, and only fluent speakers can make it work. He takes the name of Robin Swift, and the name of his birth is never used.

This is a story about complicity and colonialism and Oxford. Its subtitles are:

The Necessity of Violence
An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.

which gives you some idea where it's going! But the getting there, the tension between Robin's hatred for the system he's in and his desire to settle into it, to find at Oxford friendship and love and a golden place to grow, is incredibly compelling. This was propulsive, and at times I couldn't put it down. At one other time I put it rather violently down, whee, suicidal ideation content warning, a good one to read on a cheerful morning rather than a gloomy night. Also torture, child harm, various other stuff. Colonialism: real bad.

I'm not the reader to whom the book is saying, "Here's Oxford, I did the work, I got it right." And I'm not the reader to whom the book is saying, "These inescapable facts of the world, and history, and your life? I won't forget about them. Not even for a page." I'm the reader to whom the book is saying, "Hey. Did you forget about colonialism? Did it soften a bit in your mind? It probably did, didn't it, because you're white and distant and you don't get around to reading your history. Don't forget." I do need that; In theory, I might rather have read a realist novel covering the same material, or nonfiction - because while the magic defamiliarises the world and gives it to us in another guise, it changes very little. The shape of British imperialism is the same; the gearing is different, its requirements and vulnerabilities are different, but the machine is the same. In theory that might mean I'd rather read the nonfiction, in practice - well, I didn't, did I, I like language magic. Glad to have read this, will return to R.F. Kuang's future work, definitely not going back to The Poppy War which I have heard is darker still.