Half-Grown Garden
* Book: A Half-Grown Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.
URL =
Description
Alberto, Sci-Fi Economics sightings:
"Cory Doctorow published on his blog a raving review of a sci-fi novel
- The world of Half-Built is a complicated utopia, one in which a century of incredibly hard, smart work has carried us through the climate emergency, to the point where it’s possible to believe that, over time, we will stabilize our relationship with the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining our species. This stabilization came about as the result of a radical restructuring of society around networked “watershed” societies, organized around the watersheds of the world’s mighty rivers. These watershed societies are as transnational as their rivers, and each society is a semiautonomous part of a global federation that allocates carbon, shares intelligence, and deliberates among one another.
There’s more, much more to it. I liked particularly the idea that the very large deliberative fora that are the main way the world of Garden governs itself has also non-human entities posting on them. Thanks to sensor networks, forests, bacterial colonies and rivers can also participate in the debate. (Apparently this is an idea that Emrys took from Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds 12. Schroeder, by the way, is a futurist that uses SF to communicate his vision, and we should probably look into his work. EDIT: Schroeder got in touch and pointed out he thinks of himself as an author first, a designer second, and a futurist third). And the review itself contains interesting thoughts about how to forge an orrery of micro- and macro narrative mechanisms in SF. "