A Half-Built Garden is a well thought out first contact story, with an engaging plot — things which would make it well worth reading on its own. But as anyone familiar with my previous reviews will be aware, when I review near-future sci-fi stories about liberatory postcapitalist utopias, that’s not my primary concern. I review them for their future history worldbuilding — a sin comparable to Auden’s reading the Bible for its prose.
The story is set in the 2080s, following a mid-century Time of Troubles, when the world is emerging from the ruins of capitalism and creating a new, humanly tolerable society.
The dominant governing institution is the watershed network, a federation of self-managed local institutions more or less equivalent to bioregions, which incorporates most of the world’s population and resources. The balance of power is the result of a mostly non-violent mid-century revolution beginning a generation or two earlier, in which a combination of boycotts, sabotage, and other direct action forced the corporations into offshore enclaves. The viewpoint character, who inhabits the Chesapeake Watershed, reminisces about the days when her parents “helped place the first illicit sensors in the Potomac and barricaded factories to enforce the first crowdsourced decisions of the nascent Dandelion Revolution.”
The corporations, as is typical for this genre, consist of “billionaire lords and serf-employees huddled behind their fencelines on their artificial islands.” Their inhabitants, aside from “a few converts and visitors,” are “only the descendants of the people who’d arrived with their founder — allies and employees who’d prioritized fleeing apocalypse over creating community to stop it.”
Corporate enclaves were bounded by “fencelines,” apparently imposed from outside by the networks during the course of the Dandelion Revolution. “As for the corporations, eventually we didn’t allow it. People like my parents organized to stop them, and created the first watershed networks.” Actions taken during the Revolution ranged from “setting limits on their carbon production to get warming under control, to blocking their shipping if they went over their carbon budgets.” The corporations, “which couldn’t bear the transformation, …eventually… barricaded themselves behind their own fencelines on a few artificial islands….”
The corporations, since their relegation to island enclaves, have mostly refused any official recognition of the watersheds’ existence, and for their own part “lost any legal existence outside their own territory a long time ago.” They send observers to carbon talks, tacitly obey the carbon and other pollutant budgets the watersheds, as dominant actors, lay down for them, and cheat when they think they can evade detection. Their relative lack of power means they must file impact reports for approval by neighboring regional watershed consortia in cases where projects might have an impact beyond the fencelines.
Most of the corporations’ former economic functions, aside from a dwindling number of areas in which they still possess a monopoly on the necessary technical expertise, have been taken over by the watersheds. Some pre-watershed industrial resources have been absorbed by the watersheds — e.g. “MIT and the Pan-Asian Maker Collective” are “hooked into the dandelion networks.”
Overall, relations between watersheds and corporations amount to a cold war.
“We still buy from them, sometimes….. Things we need that we haven’t been able to back-engineer yet, or exchanges that someone thinks will eventually incentivize them to join us. And they’re allowed out among the watersheds as long as they promise to behave.”
The watersheds’ primary focus in dealing with the corporations is managing their decline — taking over their remaining indispensable functions, and in the meantime maintaining contact to encourage internal culture change and preventing any desperate rear-guard action that will get a lot of people killed.
“They’re not going to disappear any time soon — someone has to keep talking to them, or they’ll never change enough to join the rest of the world….
“We still need them. They almost broke the world, when they had power — but the corporations still make key parts of our network infrastructure. They think they need us because without those exports, they lose any justification for their continued existence. But really, that tenuous connection is their last chance to find a new justification. Every time we interact, it reminds them that there’s another way. Every freelance contract keeps the window open. When we finally take over the last of the manufacturing, the opportunity to change them vanishes — and we might need to fight the dandelion revolution all over again. I’d rather take them into the future with us.”
Nation-states still persist, but with significantly less power as the result both of the Dandelion Revolution and of their own fiscal and material exhaustion. Although most production, distribution, and governance is handled by the watersheds, nation-states still claim territorial sovereignty over the watersheds and their inhabitants (which themselves apparently comprise most of the earth’s land area). The mostly hollowed-out states (referred to at one point as “fossil states”) carry out a major share of their functions through the watersheds, with some minimal recognition of their sovereignty by the latter, in much the same way the later western Roman Empire did through German tribal authorities.
In response to a visiting extraterrestrial’s question “So how does the United States of America relate to the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network,” a NASA representative replies, “Technically, this is U.S. territory. A national park.”
The watersheds function internally as a sort of digitally networked hybrid of direct democracy, consensus, and the sort of p2p ad hocracy depicted in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Walkaway.
The dandelion communications network was designed from the ground up during the mid-century Blackouts, with an architecture aimed at facilitating such a communication style.
The dandelion networks had been created in the wake of massive malware and malinformation epidemics, first as a way to maintain communications while preserving data, then as a way to reshape and reclaim those data as tools for justice and survival.
To take one example, the Chesapeake Watershed Network put together a contact team for the alien spacecraft in their territory by putting out calls for people with previous negotiating experience with other networks, and with corporations or states, as well as biologists, and then up- or down-voting the selectees.
More generally, policy and governance questions are addressed in a stigmergic or wikified way by members posting problems or proposed solutions to the network, followed by an open-ended process of debate and up- and down-voting. Network “weighting and aggregation algorithms” coordinated decisionmaking by “threading, …constantly picking out key ideas and sorting possible approaches and marking the valence and weight of our responses.”
The interaction between the dandelion communication platform, individual members, and local economies is reminiscent of the Acquis in Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids and D-Space in Daniel Suarez’s Freedom(™). As the viewpoint character describes her interface with the network:
Then I got up and retrieved my mesh from its stand, settled the cool smartmail back over my bare scalp, and let the Network flow back into my lenses….
I eased in, catching up on half-deserted policy decisions. Streambed restoration for the Paint Branch, a proposal for using a new algae species in water treatment, the carbon budget for importing tea and coffee. There were still a few people working on those threads, refining options and adding weight to their favorites.
As I said, I review science fiction primarily for the future history timelines and other worldbuilding, rather than for the plot. But the latter is also quite engaging. Like Emrys’ Innsmouth reboots, this story wraps up — spoiler alert — with a satisfying inter-species entente.
If you’re a fan of fiction set in a better world the day after tomorrow, as an escape or source of inspiration in the face of an increasingly scary tomorrow, I highly recommend this book. In many ways it reminds me of both the utopian alternative in Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time, and the Walkaway society in Cory Doctorow’s novel of the same name, and has earned itself a space beside them as one of my favorites of the genre.
