The Child Garden is a 1989 science fiction novel by Canadian writer Geoff Ryman.

The first book was originally published in two parts as "Love Sickness" in the Summer and Autumn 1987 editions of the British science fiction magazine Interzone.

[1] In a future semitropical England cancer has been cured, but, as a result, the human lifespan has been halved and socialism has replaced capitalism.

She attempts to use holograms to stage an opera based on Dante's The Divine Comedy.

As she works on the opera she encounters the ruling body of the world, called the Consensus, an artificial hive mind made up of the mental patterns of billions of children.