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Title:Arcana Caelestia
Notice:Directory listings are in topic 2
Moderator:NETRIX::thomas
Created:Thu Dec 08 1983
Last Modified:Thu Jun 05 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:1300
Total number of notes:18728

482.0. "The Unconquered Country" by NULL::REDFORD (It's turtles all the way down) Mon Jun 08 1987 21:12

Geoff Ryman
Bantam Spectra, 1987

Here is a curious and evocative allegory.  It tells the story of Third Child,
so named as a spell against having any more children.  Her people try
to live quiet lives amidst their rice paddies and living houses, but
are constantly attacked by the Neighbors,  vicious people who are supplied
with weapons by the inscrutable people of the Big Country.  It 
sounds like Southeast Asia, but it's not, quite.  Here is a passage from
where Third Child is fleeing her village:

The Neighbors slaughtered ten of the old houses. Third's own house 
began to make a new noise, a wheedling noise, tightly constrainted.  
The walls shook delicately.  Third's mother risked looking out of the 
window, and saw them hacking at the carcass of their neighbor's 
house.  The new little white house lay by its side.  The Neighbors 
began to erect new, dead houses that could not walk to other valleys.
    "There is nothing for us here," said Third's mother.  In the 
night, she parceled up the stove, and pot, and their rice, and she 
led her children away from the village.
    They had to leave their old caring house behind.  They tethered 
it to a stake.  It knew it was being left, and couldn't understand 
why.  As they crept away it began to bellow after them, tugging at 
the line that held it.  Deserted houses sometimes died of love.

Ryman continually keeps you off balance this way.  Fighter planes smile
like sharks, puff their cheeks, and blow a deadly wind across the ground.
Advertisements come alive at night and walk through the streets.  The
Prince writes a song for his people and sends it out to them in a thousand
singing balloons.  Ryman is telling a terrible, terrible story, but it's 
a story of our time cloaked in strangenesses.  Like Ballard's "Empire 
of the Sun", it's a story that can only told surreally.  Recommended.

/jlr

PS In 1985 it won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, and the 
World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.  This is a somewhat 
expanded version.
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name		DateLines
482.1The Child GardenMTWAIN::KLAESNo Guts, No GalaxyFri Aug 19 1994 13:3769
Article: 4582
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books,alt.books.reviews
From: [email protected] (Evelyn C Leeper) 
Subject: THE CHILD GARDEN by Geoff Ryman
Sender: [email protected] (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: The Internet
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 05:07:37 GMT
 
                    THE CHILD GARDEN by Geoff Ryman
    Tor Orb, ISBN 0-312-89023-0, May 1994 (1989c), 388pp, US$13.95.
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper
 
     Tor's Orb line is bringing back into print (in trade paperback)
science fiction works that Tor's editors feel should get a wider
audience in the United States than they have gotten so far.  These may
be books that had only a hardback release, or a paperback release that
has long since gone out of print.  For example, Ryman's CHILD GARDEN,
was published in Great Britain in 1989 and in hardback in 1990 by
St. Martin's in the United States, but never got a paperback release.
Maybe publishers didn't think a book about Dante and Derrida would be a
runaway best-seller.
 
     The premise is certainly classic science fiction; in the future
viruses and other biologicals have been developed for everything.  They
are used for teaching, they allow people to photosynthesize, they are
used for social conditioning, and they have cured cancer.  The last
turns out to be a mixed blessing--the same process that caused cancer
was also what allowed the body tissues to regenerate.  The result is
that there is no cancer but no one lives past the age of 35.
 
     Into this world is born Milena.  Milena is resistant to the
viruses.  In the "Child Garden," where she is raised, she has to learn
the old-fashioned way, from books.  She can't photosynthesize, so she
has to get nutrition from food.  She isn't socially conditioned, meaning
that among other things she hasn't been "cured" of her lesbian
orientation.  And she has one other difference--she can be creative.
While everyone else is directed by their viruses, she is directed by her
own nature.  So she falls in love with a woman genetically engineered to
resemble a polar bear (so she can work in the Antarctic) who has set all
of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY to music.  (It is at this point, perhaps, that
THE CHILD GARDEN leaves the realm of easily marketable science fiction.)
Since the most popular artform of Milena's time is the perfect
reproduction of historical artforms (LOVE'S LABOUR LOST produced
identically to the first production and so on), trying to get a new
opera of THE DIVINE COMEDY produced is not the easiest trick in the
world.  One wonders, in fact, if Ryman isn't being a bit self-
referential here.  Think about it.
 
     THE CHILD GARDEN is about bioengineering and art and love and a lot
more.  It's not for everyone, but I recommend it for anyone looking for
a literate and thought-provoking novel.
 
%A      Ryman, Geoff 
%T      The Child Garden
%I      Tor Orb
%C      New York
%D      May 1994
%G      ISBN 0-312-89023-0
%P      388pp
%O      trade paperback, US$13.95 [1989]
 
-- 
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email protected]

"Am I politically correct today?  Do I do crystals and New Age?
Obviously, women's music's for me--Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, and Patti Page."
				--Lynn Lavner