Seanan McGuire is always right. This book is a masterpiece. 

This is the best first-contact novel I have ever read—including Strangers in a Strange Land—precisely because of it's scope and its confrontation of our deepest ignored fears. The people on earth are dealing with the brutal consequences of climate change. This is a post-apocalyptic novel unlike any other, and I could write essays on the set-up of this novel, the rest of the plot notwithstanding.

Emrys imagines a world where Nation-States are slow and clunky, and the corporations have been limited to the islands of Zealand where they can no longer do damage. The rest of the world is managed through the watersheds, a community based organizational system upheld by technology and algorithms. It's basically like a phone and reddit but implanted in your brain. All decisions about ecology are made as a community, with expertise given more weight. 

This is also a world of post-gender ideology. People raise children in groups of four, usually two couples who join together to be a household. Judy, the main character, and her wife Carol have a daughter Dory, and they coparent with Atheo—a transman who escaped barbaric religious gender discrimination,—and Dinar, an amputee journalist from Zealand. They too have a toddler: Raven. 

First of all, just the daily life of these people interacting with each other was so wholesome. It is exactly what I want from the universe. Sentences like "Carol and I still hadn't decided if we were going to be lovers with our co-parents" are possible. 

So all this ecology and scifi and fascinating family dynamics are abruptly interrupted when aliens arrive! They are here to save humanity from our dying planet. Only problem? The watersheds aren't willing to give up the planet. The corporations are eager to leave the planet behind, and the Nation-States don't know what they think, but they'll probably get around to it in a month or two. 

The beginning is the pivotal point of the novel, when an anomaly in the Chesapeake has Judy and Carol going to check it out in the middle of the night, bringing Dory with them. When they meet the aliens with Dory along for the ride, they spark an interplanetary negotiation about the future of their planet. 

Someone blurbed this novel and compared Emrys to Ursula K. LeGuin and I think that couldn't be more correct. In this novel you get to witness two wives flirt outrageously with an alien and eventually have sexytimes with it. You get to witness how the corporate world has weaponized gender presentation, by making it a shifting game that changes with their subtle signals (honestly the most realistic thing about this besides the devastating climate change is the idea that capitalism will eventually ruin pronouns). Which means neopronouns. Lots of neopronouns. All while trying to learn the culture of two symbiotic alien races and at the same time arguing for the future of earth, without pissing of your wife, your alien boyfriend, or your coparents. 

While I really loved the book and it's introspective nature and its inherently optimistic view of the world even in the midst of climate disaster, I found Judy to be optimistic to the point of naiveté. There are speeches that are a bit cringeworthy. Part of me wants to argue that in this future with this democratic view of conflict resolution, they are optimistic about the world. But while the watersheds argue so fiercely for the planet, I think the explorer in me wants to explore space. And the aliens have a really interesting philosophy: once any species is sufficiently technologically advanced, they can't live on a planet as they will inevitably destroy it. So they build systems of habitats in space. I don't know if I fully subscribe to that belief, but the same way Judy judges the aliens for "abandoning" their world, I also think Judy is too narrowminded in her thought processes. She refuses to entertain that humanity partially moving to space could be good for both humanity and the planet, and for that, I'm knocking off half a star. 

4.5/5 poly trans-species found-family in space stars