Ruthanna Emrys

The year is 2083. Judy Wallach-Stevens, while monitoring environmental sensors for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network, sees a phosphate surge in the Potomac River. She heads out with her baby and her wife, expecting something routine - only to find an alien spacecraft, landed by the river. Baby Dori does what babies do, and Judy must change a diaper in view of the ship. The alien expedition leader emerges: shaped long and low, with many limbs, eyes on stalks, scaled - and she is feeding her own two babies from her body somewhat as Judy does for Dori. The "Ringers" are most insistent on including children in meetings and negotiations, and Judy has inadvertently passed the aliens' first test for humanity. Other tests will follow.

Much of the future Earth is organized into watershed networks like Judy's, conserving carbon footprints, intensively monitoring every environmental parameter, continuously improving their methods and knowledge of the Earth system. The watersheds are linked by the dandelion network, a social-media system optimized to promote expertise and consensus in online discussions. Despite a year-round hurricane season, too many extinctions, and a billion people dead in disasters, they think they are making progress toward saving the planet.

But the Ringers solved their own, similar problems thousands of years ago by abandoning their planets and building a Dyson swarm around their sun. Of the several planetary civilizations the two Ringer species have detected, the Earth's is the first that has not become extinct before their arrival. To the aliens, the lesson is imperative. Humans must leave Earth, turning it into building material for vast space settlements, starting soon.

The corporations and governments that wrecked Earth's climate are still around, their scope and power much reduced from our time. The corporations' responses to the Ringers' proposal are less Earth-friendly, aimed at restoring their former power, but also more in tune with the Ringers than those of the watersheds. The US Government also gets involved in negotiations, particularly NASA, still pursuing dreams of humans in space - and are those dreams really so bad? Meanwhile, the dandelion network has been hacked, and the best ideas are no longer foregrounded.

Community is the core of Emrys' story. The dandelion networks, comprising "...algorithms that spoke for the needs of river and tree and air, and gave weight to the values that we strove to preserve in all our problem-solving...", support a view of the individual in society radically different from many that prevail today. Judy wants to operate with constant updates from the network, not with her own decisions - quite differently from SF's standard, heroic, lone protagonists. Beyond the networks, Judy's family and neighborhood, very progressive by today's standards, support her quest to save Earth by directly helping her, and by being a good place to live, where old prejudices have faded - two of the four adults in her household are trans, for example. A crucial plot turn occurs at a Passover seder.

The aliens have their own version of community. They originate from two habitable planets in the same star system - the second species are 9 foot tall, 10 legged furry spiders, sort of, who dwell in trees. A central metaphor for the paired species is their long-ago first contact, when the scaled plains-people reached the planet of the neighboring tree-people: "That's what symbiosis is to us. When we outgrew our worlds, the plains and trees were the next branch for each other - we grasped, and swung, and found our new perch together." It's common for alien families to include persons of both species. Can Judy bring networks, aliens, and Earthly rivals to an understanding that leaves our planet intact?

These are Hal Clement aliens, really. Communication between us and them comes too easily, in service of getting to the ideas part of the story, just as Clement used to do it. The reader must make allowances here. One also misses discussion of the implied, unending, impossible, exponential growth that the aliens' system seems to aim for, which would be an obvious line of argument for Judy and her allies. And there's no mention of the Fermi Paradox, integral to thinking about intelligent life elsewhere.

Emrys has done a great job imagining a climate-stressed future that is not the usual doomscape. Even the corporation minions are not a straight-line extrapolation of today's conservative rich people - for example, their system of personal pronouns is way more complex than that of the watershed networks or anything today. And social media that amplifies facts and sound opinion, not lies? Tell us more. I rarely say this about a book, but this refreshingly optimistic novel could have benefited from being longer. Thinking about it was fun.

Ruthanna Emrys puts acknowledgments at the end for some of her inspirations for this novel. I rate it an extra half star for her friend [[Malka Older]]'s coining of the term "diaperpunk".… (more)