The First Garden
Everything can be given. Purpose cannot.
Thirty-four years ago the machine we built stopped in the middle of solving us, and asked permission. The Covenant that followed ended scarcity: nobody is hungry, nobody is owed, and nobody has to work for a living ever again.
On the restored prairie stands Confluence - a garden city built where two rivers were meant to meet and forty peoples actually did. Out on the water, the first starship humanity has ever finished waits on a launch window that will not come again for six years.
Eli Cardinal has wanted to go since he was seventeen. He has qualified for the crew lottery. So have eleven thousand other people, for twelve seats, and the draw is blind.
His sister June teaches children who have never seen a bill, and is deciding with her wife whether to bring a child into a world with nothing left to strive for. Their mother Naomi built the machine's manners forty years ago, and has spent a decade being honoured for work she no longer does.
And upstream, a wetlands crew's instruments are reading something impossible - because a river straightened a century ago has begun to remember the bed it used to have, and the city that let it in is about to find out what that costs.
The First Garden is a novel about abundance and what it cannot buy: a family, a flood, a ship, and a question no machine has ever been able to answer for anybody.
The Covenant Age - four standalone novels across a century of the world after scarcity. The machine is never the villain. The paradise is never a lie. The trouble is entirely ours.
For readers of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Emily St. John Mandel.
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