In an Austerity Britain of the near future, cultivating plants that have the appearance of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet appears to be a way to dig a flagging bespoke plant design company out of a financial black hole…
Truth be told the story didn’t really grab me – it just felt a little leaden and more the like the kind of story that was in Analog back in the day when I was reading it (and the kind of story that led me to stop reading it). The protagonist is a particularly unengaging character, as his his partner (and frankly you don’t care for either of them!). And when a story stoops to describing a sketch from a TV show (Spitting Image and the famous Margaret Thatcher ‘vegetables’ sketch) that suggests a story that was a germ of an idea, but the plant was rushed out of the greenhouse a bit too early, without enough hardening off.