Marketed by good old Gollancz as one of a special selection of “SF Masterworks”, warning bells should have been ringing for me when one of the blurbs/review quotes suggested that this particular SF novel shaded over into the realm of literary fiction. Oo er. Personally, literary fiction is my least favourite genre, and I find it all terribly tedious.

The Child Garden could be described as part of the recent trend in exploring the post-human condition. In this case, humans have been (a) genetically engineered to photosynthesise at least part of their nutrition; and (b) left (by various ironic medical advances) with a terribly short lifespan and hardly any childhood. Most people are dead at 35 and therefore achieve adulthood at around 8 years of age. Knowledge is programmed into people by viruses, and teenagers are (and act as if they are) middle aged.

So far so standard. Larry Niven was writing about knowledge being programmed into people by strands of RNA in the 70s (see his early novel A World out of Time or the short story “Rammer”), and many of the other ideas were as familiar.

The literary part of this was the way it was written. All the ideas are over-laboured, and the prose is dense and repetitive, eminently skipable. It aspires to be Dickensian in the manner of The Light Ages, but it ends up emulating Dickens only in as much as it is a bit dull.

This was a real disappointment, because I was quite prepared to trust that Gollancz had genuinely selected some corkers in its SF Masterworks series. But looking at the list, that purveyor of wank Philip K. Dick is over-represented, and I’m afraid that Ryman’s Child Garden is more of the same. Incidentally, the blurb on the cover mentions a London surrounded by rice paddies, as if this was some kind of prescient global warming tome. I honestly have no idea where the blurb writers got the bit about rice paddies from. Maybe a bit I skipped.

(Gollancz’s list does have some good titles, but I do wish they’d revisit their classic series of annual “Best of the Year” collections, edited by Terry Carr.)