![]() ![]() This alone is enough to make the novel stand out from the crowd, and it’s a hugely welcome change from the standard “Aliens! We have to fight them!!” basis of so much SF and, indeed, human interaction. ![]() But this is fundamentally an optimistic book, so people of all body shapes talk it through and come up with a good consensus decision. They come in peace, they say, but their perception of humanity’s needs doesn’t align with the dandelion networks’ aims. (Ada Palmer’s back-cover comment that, “Emrys masterfully demonstrates how a medium-good future can send more chilling warnings than dystopia,” is spot on.) Weather which used to be extreme is now normal thanks to global warming, and they have to keep on developing new food crops to cope with climate shift. The dandelion networks have created a warm, inclusive, egalitarian community but fixing the degraded environment they inherited is a constant struggle. By this time nation states and corporations have withered but not vanished, effectively replaced by the ‘dandelion network’ of fully participatory democracies centred on local communities. ![]() A Half-built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (Pan, 2022) is eco-SF set in the 2080s. ![]()
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