re:mote voices

Title: The Child Garden
Author: Geoff Ryman
Publisher:Gollancz

Milena Shibush isn't like the other residents of London. For a starter she is immune to the viruses which are used as a tool to shape people, to educate people, meaning that she has to do everything the hard way, and that people often think she is dumb. Because of her immunity/reaction to the viruses she hasn't been read by the Consensus like everyone else, so she isn't part of the group mind that runs the country, not has she been "cured" of her lesbian tendencies. To mark herself out even more, she has fought to be an actress - in a world where people have been genetically engineered so that they can photosynthesize like plants, actors need to eat as normal maintain the white complexion that actors in the old plays would have had.

The Child Garden is full of big ideas and how big ideas can often have big consequences. We find the cure for cancer, but it turns out cancer relates to longevity, and now people die at 35 and war breaks out. We find the perfect educational system with viruses, and the viruses mutate, and by their nature the mutations spread. We find the perfect government in Consensus, but in doing so we seem to lose all creativity. The last being what the Child Garden is about, isolated little Milena meets Rolfa, a polar bear. Polar bear being the nick name for a genetically engineered person, who has been transformed to be able to live in the Antarctic. As a bear, Rolfa isn't taken seriously - partly because she is different, partly because that means she is not part of Consensus - despite which Rolfa is a brilliant composer. Bringing Rolfa's music to life becomes Milena's goal.

Prior to reading The Child Garden my only knowledge of Geoff Ryman was from reading a handful of short stories and the reputation he created for himself after the promotion of the sub-genre of Mundane Science fiction. The Child Garden is one of the most recent edition to the SF Masterworks series. As a novel it is overflowing with ideas, dense with brilliant little nuggets. On the other hand it is slow, non-linear and frustrating, taking me longer to read than anything I have read in a good while. Ryman starts off The Child Garden well, introducing us to the characters and building up momentum. Then he gets to the end of part one, and changes the rules, establishing that everything that went before was in fact a flashback, apparently giving license to wander back and forward through Milena's entire life in turgid and random detail. In the end The Child Garden is transformed from being a nice little story to being an epic, and its taken there kicking and screaming. There are chunks of The Child Garden that I thoroughly enjoyed, just as there were chunks where I couldn't have cared less.