The Child Garden

Imagine a London that has become semi-tropical, where people photosynthesise, where cancer has been cured but the human lifespan has been cut in half. Imagine a place where viruses are used to educate, to inform, to control. That is the world of Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden, a place where bioengineering has run riot. Everything, including houses, machines and even spaceships, is genetically engineered. In a novel in which we meet Lucy, an immortal tumour, and Joseph, whose mind is used to store information for other people, one girl is immune to the viruses. As she tries to stage an opera based on The Divine Comedy, she meets the hive mind which rules the world and which is lonely and afraid of dying. Why it's on the list: The Child Garden won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the novella which forms the first part of the book won the BSFA Award.