A Half Built Garden
Oct. 19th, 2022 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
Emrys, who I already liked because of "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land", was so cool on the Hopepunk panel at Worldcon that I picked up her new book, which she calls her 'diaperpunk' novel because it's very preoccupied with the mundane tasks of motherhood and parenthood and how those interact with envisioning a better future for humanity on a larger scale. It's also, as her presence on the Hopepunk panel indicates, a decidedly hopepunk novel, full of conviction that groups of people struggling together against insurmountable problems can improve the world. It's also, also, an extremely Jewish book. It's also a very DC metro-area book- I've been reccing it in particular to all my wonky DC area friends. It's chewy and complicated and I could say a lot of things about it. Here's a few, scribbled over the past few weeks, lest this review grow and grow and never get posted.
The premise of the book is that some 50 years in the future, grassroots leftist environmental activists have somehow engineered a revolution taking control of any governmental functions related to climate change in decentralized technodemocracies each centered around the care and feeding of a major river watershed. The so-called Dandelion Networks operate by way of Reddit-style upvoting of good ideas, curated by magical AI algorithms that reinforce ideas that are in sync with the communities' values. It's a really clever mixture of high tech and eco-futurism that I find extremely implausible but fun to think about.
The United States still exists, but it's not really clear what it does anymore... at one point the narrator describes attending regular meetings to inform the EPA that the Chesapeake Watershed Network's river standards are stricter than the EPA's, so this meeting is pointless. Possibly the US exists for red state/blue state bickering, possibly there are regions that did not join the dandelion networks and are still part of the federalist system, I don't know.
Major multinational corporations still exist, and they still handle some manufacturing that is infeasible to do in an environmentally friendly way, but they have been sidelined and relegated to islands that limit their participation in what remains of a global economy; localism being the political order of the day.
In the midst of this glorious environmentalist utopia, where carbon dioxide overuse has been routed and global temperatures have finally started to grudgingly retreat and where everyone lives happy lives in multi-family houses full of handmade jams and homegrown herbs... aliens land, leaking organic pollutants.
The aliens are of the Elon Musk school that resources are for consuming, if Musk were intellectually honest and trying to establish a morally defensible ideology. They believe the laws of entropy and chaos theory tell them that planetary resources will inevitably be consumed and planets are too complicated to be tamed, so they cannibalized their own home planets and are in the process of constructing a Dyson sphere to live in. And they send explorers around to possibly habitable planets in search of species that they can save before their failure to become as enlightened throws them into environmental catastrophe. Earth is the first time they've found a living civilization, they keep showing up too late and finding civilizations that destroyed themselves through engineered ecological disaster.
The tension between our heroes, extreme localist environmentalists, and the two alien species they meet, is deeply fascinating and is explored with incredible sensitivity to the way these big logical debates are really emotional debates. All of this is cast in extremely stark relief by the fact that the alien species are matriarchal and insist that high level negotiations be held between nursing mothers in the presence of their babies, partially in order that the babies be sort of hostages of good faith, and sort of out of a belief that maternal instincts make good negotiators.
I found it best to not think too hard about the logistics of the Dandelion Networks and for the purpose of the story focus on how they feel. As soon as I start thinking about the logistics I get hung up on how their localism and decentralized-by-watershed central planning interacts with its desperate need for a functioning semiconductor production supply chain. You can't have everyone on the Eco Blockchain without new, powerful semiconductor devices constantly being churned out, and this is not one of those eco-dystopias where people are out scavenging circuit boards off of golden age toasters.
It's possible the answer is that this is the one thing that corporations still do for them. In fact, it's made clear that at least some of the chips running their network algorithm come from an evil corporation, but I think she explicitly says only about a third. Where are the other two thirds coming from?
Here's how you make CPUs, by the way, in a simple schematic way from someone who's only seen the edges of the process:
1. Purify silicon into a high purity silicon ingot, then cut wafers to serve as substrates.
2. Deposit hundreds of incredibly precisely defined high purity layers of different semiconductor materials using CVD, PVD, thermal evaporation, MBE, lithography and other processes,, as much as possible in a single automated fab line to minimize exposure to impurities
3. Dice your wafer into dozens of device dies.
4. Test all of them and throw out the ones where the deposition process was not of sufficiently high quality.
5. Package the dies with contacts and connectors.
It's not a process where random people from the local co-op can just sign up for shifts. It's also not a particularly environmentally friendly process, many of the chemical precursors used in depositing the semiconductor layers have nasty byproducts that can't just be exhausted into environment. Also, because the process is high purity and is ruined by any contamination at many points in the process, high quality speciality materials are needed to make many of the required machines. Just as one example, you can't simply use 'normal' stainless steel tubing to transport the gases, you need high purity, low surface roughness electropolished stainless steel tubing. There is literally a whole cottage industry of doing specialty cleaning of semiconductor tool parts. Why is there an ongoing semiconductor shortage spanning over two years at this point? Because the supply chain is incredibly complicated and incredibly sensitive by the nature of all the strange high precision parts it requires. And also because it's a tremendously bootstrapped process- the process control requires huge numbers of last generation semiconductor chips to operate to make the next generation. Over the past couple years, flow controller manufacturers have had to retool their production lines to use alternate chips because their normal control chips were unavailable... and their normal control chips were unavailable because their manufacturers were waiting for more flow controllers.
I don't understand how Emrys's Dandelion Networks can replicate/replace these sorts of supply chains. Better to handwave something about advanced nanoassembly and move on.
On the other hand, I listened to Laurie Garrett talking to Vincent Racaniello about wastewaster testing and I could almost taste Emrys's future in their conversation. Garrett envisions a phone attachment that can do PCR analysis of waste water, cheap enough (~ $1 per test) to send lightly trained workers out around the world to do disease surveillance, cheap enough to deputize the whole world as environmental monitors at a level like we've never seen before. And that's very much the vision of the book, a world where technology that is just around the corner has enabled us to retake control of our environment away from central authorities, to take responsibility for our local environment in a way that is not ignorant of larger consequences. A world that is interconnected but not in a fragile way. It's a vision of the future I really wish we could have. But of course it's not the only possible vision of the future, and I love that the book forces us, at a deep level, to ask what happens when our worldview is challenged by circumstances it's not designed to confront.
Ways in which A Half-Built Garden reminded me of The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum:
- They're the two most complicated stories I've read in the past few years, let's just mention that right off, because it could be I'm mostly comparing them because I haven't gotten an intellectual workout like this in a while. And they're certainly very different in some ways. The Unravelling is as insistently far-future as possible, while A Half-Built Garden is just a few steps into tomorrow.
-But they're both centrally about parenthood in a way that I think is kind of rare in the genre. A Half-Built Garden is specifically about motherhood and the act of nursing a child, but it's intensely focused on that, and the diapers and logistics of it all, as well as how a person lives a life that is about other things besides the child, when the child is so necessarily a part of everything that you do. And it's about relationships with co-parents and how they evolve, and how people lean on each other when their limits are stretched. The children in The Unraveling are older, and so the book is more preoccupied with the reciprocal obligations between parent and child, whereas A Half-Built Garden is concerned with the one way obligation of parent to child, and to a degree about the way in which paternalism only makes ethical sense in that small window before children can assert their own selfhood, and after that it becomes self-defeating.
-And both are about The Algorithms and what it's like living inside a mostly benign, technologically mediated panopticon and when that feels stifling and when it doesn't. They're both way more optimistic about the power of information technology than I'm used to seeing in modern SFF, they're not anti-twitter, they just argue for a better engineering of how twitter works.
- And they're both super Jewish, Rosenbaum's mostly through the Talmudic metaphor of the Long Talmud. A Half-Built Garden has a lovely scene where the aliens are invited to participate in the narrator's family seder, and spends a lot of delightful energy on alien worlds wondering how to decide if the food satisfies her kosher standards. The particular ways in which they are most Jewish are similar, they're very much about how can ancient tradition be made to speak to our modern dilemmas?
Anyway, this book was super cool and it made me think a lot about the future in digestible but complicated ways, and I highly recommend it.
Emrys, who I already liked because of "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land", was so cool on the Hopepunk panel at Worldcon that I picked up her new book, which she calls her 'diaperpunk' novel because it's very preoccupied with the mundane tasks of motherhood and parenthood and how those interact with envisioning a better future for humanity on a larger scale. It's also, as her presence on the Hopepunk panel indicates, a decidedly hopepunk novel, full of conviction that groups of people struggling together against insurmountable problems can improve the world. It's also, also, an extremely Jewish book. It's also a very DC metro-area book- I've been reccing it in particular to all my wonky DC area friends. It's chewy and complicated and I could say a lot of things about it. Here's a few, scribbled over the past few weeks, lest this review grow and grow and never get posted.
The premise of the book is that some 50 years in the future, grassroots leftist environmental activists have somehow engineered a revolution taking control of any governmental functions related to climate change in decentralized technodemocracies each centered around the care and feeding of a major river watershed. The so-called Dandelion Networks operate by way of Reddit-style upvoting of good ideas, curated by magical AI algorithms that reinforce ideas that are in sync with the communities' values. It's a really clever mixture of high tech and eco-futurism that I find extremely implausible but fun to think about.
The United States still exists, but it's not really clear what it does anymore... at one point the narrator describes attending regular meetings to inform the EPA that the Chesapeake Watershed Network's river standards are stricter than the EPA's, so this meeting is pointless. Possibly the US exists for red state/blue state bickering, possibly there are regions that did not join the dandelion networks and are still part of the federalist system, I don't know.
Major multinational corporations still exist, and they still handle some manufacturing that is infeasible to do in an environmentally friendly way, but they have been sidelined and relegated to islands that limit their participation in what remains of a global economy; localism being the political order of the day.
In the midst of this glorious environmentalist utopia, where carbon dioxide overuse has been routed and global temperatures have finally started to grudgingly retreat and where everyone lives happy lives in multi-family houses full of handmade jams and homegrown herbs... aliens land, leaking organic pollutants.
The aliens are of the Elon Musk school that resources are for consuming, if Musk were intellectually honest and trying to establish a morally defensible ideology. They believe the laws of entropy and chaos theory tell them that planetary resources will inevitably be consumed and planets are too complicated to be tamed, so they cannibalized their own home planets and are in the process of constructing a Dyson sphere to live in. And they send explorers around to possibly habitable planets in search of species that they can save before their failure to become as enlightened throws them into environmental catastrophe. Earth is the first time they've found a living civilization, they keep showing up too late and finding civilizations that destroyed themselves through engineered ecological disaster.
The tension between our heroes, extreme localist environmentalists, and the two alien species they meet, is deeply fascinating and is explored with incredible sensitivity to the way these big logical debates are really emotional debates. All of this is cast in extremely stark relief by the fact that the alien species are matriarchal and insist that high level negotiations be held between nursing mothers in the presence of their babies, partially in order that the babies be sort of hostages of good faith, and sort of out of a belief that maternal instincts make good negotiators.
I found it best to not think too hard about the logistics of the Dandelion Networks and for the purpose of the story focus on how they feel. As soon as I start thinking about the logistics I get hung up on how their localism and decentralized-by-watershed central planning interacts with its desperate need for a functioning semiconductor production supply chain. You can't have everyone on the Eco Blockchain without new, powerful semiconductor devices constantly being churned out, and this is not one of those eco-dystopias where people are out scavenging circuit boards off of golden age toasters.
It's possible the answer is that this is the one thing that corporations still do for them. In fact, it's made clear that at least some of the chips running their network algorithm come from an evil corporation, but I think she explicitly says only about a third. Where are the other two thirds coming from?
Here's how you make CPUs, by the way, in a simple schematic way from someone who's only seen the edges of the process:
1. Purify silicon into a high purity silicon ingot, then cut wafers to serve as substrates.
2. Deposit hundreds of incredibly precisely defined high purity layers of different semiconductor materials using CVD, PVD, thermal evaporation, MBE, lithography and other processes,, as much as possible in a single automated fab line to minimize exposure to impurities
3. Dice your wafer into dozens of device dies.
4. Test all of them and throw out the ones where the deposition process was not of sufficiently high quality.
5. Package the dies with contacts and connectors.
It's not a process where random people from the local co-op can just sign up for shifts. It's also not a particularly environmentally friendly process, many of the chemical precursors used in depositing the semiconductor layers have nasty byproducts that can't just be exhausted into environment. Also, because the process is high purity and is ruined by any contamination at many points in the process, high quality speciality materials are needed to make many of the required machines. Just as one example, you can't simply use 'normal' stainless steel tubing to transport the gases, you need high purity, low surface roughness electropolished stainless steel tubing. There is literally a whole cottage industry of doing specialty cleaning of semiconductor tool parts. Why is there an ongoing semiconductor shortage spanning over two years at this point? Because the supply chain is incredibly complicated and incredibly sensitive by the nature of all the strange high precision parts it requires. And also because it's a tremendously bootstrapped process- the process control requires huge numbers of last generation semiconductor chips to operate to make the next generation. Over the past couple years, flow controller manufacturers have had to retool their production lines to use alternate chips because their normal control chips were unavailable... and their normal control chips were unavailable because their manufacturers were waiting for more flow controllers.
I don't understand how Emrys's Dandelion Networks can replicate/replace these sorts of supply chains. Better to handwave something about advanced nanoassembly and move on.
On the other hand, I listened to Laurie Garrett talking to Vincent Racaniello about wastewaster testing and I could almost taste Emrys's future in their conversation. Garrett envisions a phone attachment that can do PCR analysis of waste water, cheap enough (~ $1 per test) to send lightly trained workers out around the world to do disease surveillance, cheap enough to deputize the whole world as environmental monitors at a level like we've never seen before. And that's very much the vision of the book, a world where technology that is just around the corner has enabled us to retake control of our environment away from central authorities, to take responsibility for our local environment in a way that is not ignorant of larger consequences. A world that is interconnected but not in a fragile way. It's a vision of the future I really wish we could have. But of course it's not the only possible vision of the future, and I love that the book forces us, at a deep level, to ask what happens when our worldview is challenged by circumstances it's not designed to confront.
Ways in which A Half-Built Garden reminded me of The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum:
- They're the two most complicated stories I've read in the past few years, let's just mention that right off, because it could be I'm mostly comparing them because I haven't gotten an intellectual workout like this in a while. And they're certainly very different in some ways. The Unravelling is as insistently far-future as possible, while A Half-Built Garden is just a few steps into tomorrow.
-But they're both centrally about parenthood in a way that I think is kind of rare in the genre. A Half-Built Garden is specifically about motherhood and the act of nursing a child, but it's intensely focused on that, and the diapers and logistics of it all, as well as how a person lives a life that is about other things besides the child, when the child is so necessarily a part of everything that you do. And it's about relationships with co-parents and how they evolve, and how people lean on each other when their limits are stretched. The children in The Unraveling are older, and so the book is more preoccupied with the reciprocal obligations between parent and child, whereas A Half-Built Garden is concerned with the one way obligation of parent to child, and to a degree about the way in which paternalism only makes ethical sense in that small window before children can assert their own selfhood, and after that it becomes self-defeating.
-And both are about The Algorithms and what it's like living inside a mostly benign, technologically mediated panopticon and when that feels stifling and when it doesn't. They're both way more optimistic about the power of information technology than I'm used to seeing in modern SFF, they're not anti-twitter, they just argue for a better engineering of how twitter works.
- And they're both super Jewish, Rosenbaum's mostly through the Talmudic metaphor of the Long Talmud. A Half-Built Garden has a lovely scene where the aliens are invited to participate in the narrator's family seder, and spends a lot of delightful energy on alien worlds wondering how to decide if the food satisfies her kosher standards. The particular ways in which they are most Jewish are similar, they're very much about how can ancient tradition be made to speak to our modern dilemmas?
Anyway, this book was super cool and it made me think a lot about the future in digestible but complicated ways, and I highly recommend it.
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Date: 2022-10-19 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-10-19 07:47 pm (UTC)