The Child Garden

infobox Book |
name = The Child Garden
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Cover of first edition (hardcover)
author = Geoff Ryman
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United Kingdom
language = English
series =
genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = Unwin Hyman
release_date = 1989
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages = 389 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-044-40393-3
preceded_by =
followed_by = "The Child Garden" is a 1989 science fiction novel by Geoff Ryman. It won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1990.

Plot introduction

In a future tropical England cancer has been cured, but as a result the human lifespan has been halved. The novel tells the story of Milena, a young woman who is immune to the viruses which are routinely used to educate people.

It is a world transformed by global warming and by advances in genetic engineering. Houses, machines, even spaceships are genetically-engineered lifeforms.

Milena works as an actress and the story follows her attempts to stage an opera based on Dante's Divine Comedy using holograms. The opera is written by her genetically modified friend Rolfa. As she works on the opera she encounters the ruling body of the world, "The Consensus" a hive mind made up of the mental patterns of billions of children. Milena slowly discovers that this gesalt consciousness is lonely and afraid of dying and is looking to Milena as a form of salvation.In the closing scenes of the story, as Milena succumbs to cancer, the Consensus experiences a fracturing of its self that may be its death or may be its transition to higher plane of consciousness.

The Child Garden shares certain similarities with the novel Blood Music by Greg Bear. Both address possible evolutionary courses for the human race and the ramifications for human consciousness. Blood Music more explicitly deals with some of the phenomenological notions of Teilhard de Chardin, specifically the "noosphere". The Child Garden takes a more oblique approach to these ideas but certainly seems to be influenced by them.or|date=August 2008