Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

Apr 27, 2015 Dan Schwent rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2015

Millions of years into the future, the Earth is tidally locked with the sun and the sunny side is dominated by a banyan tree of mind-boggling size. Mile-wide plant spiders crawl from the Earth to the moon on vast webs. As for man, he is now a foot and a half high, green, and running scared all the time...

I got this from Netgalley.

I was pretty conflicted about this book. On one hand, I love the setting. Come on! A far-future earth dominated by colossal plants with giant spiders crawling from the ...more

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Aug 10, 2008 Stephen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: award-winner-hugo, award-nominee-hugo, to-re-read, 1954-1969, science-fiction, giant-mean-things, the-worlds-the-thing, down-the-food-chain, far-future

A FAR-FUTURE Earth where PLANTS are at the TOP of the FOOD CHAIN, HUMANS are MEALS and GIANT, SPIDER-LIKE PLANTS travel on webs between the MOON and EARTH...that is not just COOL....that's BLACK DYNAMITE COOL!!

4.5 to 5.0 stars. This book is all about WORLD-BUILDING and Brian Aldiss has created a TRIPtastically SUPERB vision of a “far future” Earth unlike anything I have ever read. In the distant future, evolution has decided to BOOT the “Animal Kingdon” square in the nether-regions…

…and pla ...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Apatt rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, sf-top-20, top-20, sci-fi, pre-80s-sf

I seldom reread books because there are too many interesting unread books in the world to catch up with but some books just haunt me, demanding to be reread because I have forgotten too many details. I was walking around in a lush garden and I was reminded of this book and felt the need to reread it. This book is set on a far future Earth near the end of its existence, the sun is imminently going nova, human society and civilization have crumbled long ago. Plants and vegetable reign supreme, and I seldom reread books because there are too many interesting unread books in the world to catch up with but some books just haunt me, demanding to be reread because I have forgotten too many details. I was walking around in a lush garden and I was reminded of this book and felt the need to reread it. This book is set on a far future Earth near the end of its existence, the sun is imminently going nova, human society and civilization have crumbled long ago. Plants and vegetable reign supreme, and human beings have devolved into primitive little green people the size of monkeys.

"Only five great families survived among the rampant green life; the tigerflies, the treebees, the plantants and the termights were social insects mighty and invincible. And the fifth family was man, lowly and easily killed, not organized as the insects were, but not extinct, the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world."

As you can see, things look pretty grim for mankind! This book gives us a fascinating look at devolution in action, beside the little green people who are our direct descendants, there are subspecies of man who are presumably descended from crossbreeding of unknown origin.The most interesting example being the tummy-belly men who have a symbiosis relationship with a tree that feeds and control them through a tail which functions like an umbilical cord. When this is cut the tummy-belly men become clumsy, floundering and almost mindless; with a speech pattern which is particularly hilarious (much funnier than Yoda's). Aldiss' plant dominated Earth is full of ambulatory mostly carnivorous plants, John Wyndham's Triffids would have some very stiff competition here.

The best thing about this book is the vivid world-building that you can really submerge in. This is the most fascinating post-apocalyptic future Earth I have ever seen depicted in science fiction. I almost want to be there, except I don't fancy my chances in that environment, certainly I would like to see it portrayed in a decent movie. The aggressive environment reminds me of the action-packed Deathworld 1 by Harry Harrison (long-time collaborator of Brian Aldiss), the aforementioned The Day of the Triffids, and - strangely enough - my favorite computer game Plants vs. Zombies. The naivety of the human protagonists reminds me of William Golding's Lord of the Flies at times. The characters are not "deep" but they are believable, the weird plants tend to have oddly whimsical names in spite of their deadliness, and the whole thing is written in very nice literate English prose.

I am not sure about the profundity that some other reviewers mentioned in their reviews of this book if there is a subtext it is not obvious to me, but for sheer escapism, you can not beat this one. A very firm 5 stars rating from me.
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Update: Sadly Brian Aldiss just passed away (Aug 21, 2017), we just lost another sci-fi legend.

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Aug 18, 2013 Michael Fierce rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, cryptobotany, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, fantasy-classic, speculative-fiction, short-stories, i-own-paperback, avatar-related, adventure

After reaching the halfway mark, I threw this book down (you can read later why) only to pick it up again because 1) I think it unfair when someone rates/reviews a book they haven't finished, as I have never felt that was a fair way to judge a book, potentially destroying an author's chance to reach an audience, perhaps even ruining their career, and 2) This was a HUGO AWARD WINNING BOOK and I strongly believed there must have been a good reason why!

But, I didn't follow my own rules of doing th

After reaching the halfway mark, I threw this book down (you can read later why) only to pick it up again because 1) I think it unfair when someone rates/reviews a book they haven't finished, as I have never felt that was a fair way to judge a book, potentially destroying an author's chance to reach an audience, perhaps even ruining their career, and 2) This was a HUGO AWARD WINNING BOOK and I strongly believed there must have been a good reason why!

But, I didn't follow my own rules of doing things and thus originally rated it a 2, and reviewed it in full.

I wanted so badly to like it, believing it had several things going for it.

Here are the 5 reasons why I felt it would be an awesome read:

1. It's set in the future in which the Earth's elliptical rotation around the sun has come to a complete standstill, with the moon's orbit around the Earth MIA as well. One half of the Earth is forever caught in the full blast of 24/7 sunlight, while the other side is evidently in complete darkness. The results? After man and all life on Earth faced a post-apocalyptic radiation scenario, the sun-side of our planet re-invented itself into a lush, tropical cryptobotanical (I think I made that word up) forest-world where all plant-life and vegetation evolved into sentience, of lesser and greater degrees.

2. The plants and vegetation evolved so greatly that many lifeforms mirrored and imitated animals from our time-period, not only in behavioral patterns and functionality, but in many cases, even in their physical description.

3. Man has (d)evolved into almost fairy-like versions of ourselves, originally without wings, very light on their feet, with climbing skills that would put most orangutans, spider monkeys, and lemurs to shame. They're only about 1 1/2 feet tall, and not an ounce of fat on them. To top it off, they're green!

4a. Because of the harsh environment, these proto-humans live in the middle of the upper & lower reaches of their web-like forest-world, ~ much in the way the Wookiees do in Star Wars on their jungle/forest-world home planet, Kashyyyk.
;)

4b. Due to this, they live predictably short life-spans, maturing rapidly in order to survive, mate/have sex usually by the time they are 10 yrs old! and die, or should I say, *DROP OFF INTO THE GREEN*, at an alarming rate.

5. And, once again,this may be the most important reason why this should be a killer to read:

It's a HUGO AWARD WINNING NOVEL!

Further, Harlan Ellison - whose short story collection, Deathbird Stories, I like a lot - just LOVED IT!!

Here are the 5 reasons why I initially struggled greatly with it:

1. From the beginning pages, the world, though interesting, isn't as understandably descriptive as I needed it to be.

2. The characters I liked most from the outset either died off or were MIA for all or most of the remainder of the book, like the too few insects, such as the bee-creature on the book cover, seen here:

3. The plot was....uhhh...there was no plot! Or, at least there didn't seem to be for over half of the book (more on that later); just a bunch of fairy-sized proto-humans running around trying to survive.

4. Some characters had really annoying YA-ish - well, bad YA-ish - names that grated on my nerves to NO END, like, Poyly and Veggy (which made me constantly axe myself: Veggie as in veg·e·ta·ble ? or more like as if you put a V in front of egg , throwing a Y on the end of it? Arrrghhh!

5. It would have kids mating in the middle of a strange scenario, and at other times, the younger, and less mature of the group, would show off their genitals to the elder kids to display their *manhood* and abilty to mate ~ thus clearly proving this isn't a kid's book(!) ~ only for this adult book to decline into hella weak sauce children's book dialogue, the likes of which I couldn't force myself to digest any longer, right after I was just patting myself on the back for having gotten past the halfway mark. And then I read this:

"Great herder, we see you since you come. We Tummy-tree chaps are seeing your size. So know you will soon love to kill us when you go up from playing the sandwich game along with your lady in the leaves. We clever chaps are no fools, and not fools are clever to make glad for you. All the Tummy-men have no feeding and pray you give us feeding because we have no mummy Tummy-feeding--"

Gren gestured impatiently.

"We've no food either," he said. We are humans like you. We too must fend for ourselves."

"Alas, we did not dare to have any hopes you would share your food with us, for your food is sacred and you wish to see us starve. You are very clever to hide from us the jumpvil food we know you always carry. We are glad great herder, that you make us starve if our dying makes you have a laugh and a gay song and another sandwich game. Because we are humble, we do not need food to die with..."
YEP.

I wanted to chuck this mutherfunker as hard as I could across the room! Or, better yet, after composing myself, let it *DROP OFF INTO THE GREEN* ORGANICS WASTE MANAGEMENT TRASH BIN outside...to let this book serve a better purpose than waste any more of my time.

LUCKILY, I didn't! I picked it up again, and although I never came to like the 'tummy-belly' men, or most of the names of the creatures and characters; the carry-catchy-kind, the Traversers, the Arablers, etc., I was shocked at how engaged I became in the story, even liking the plot that somehow, subtly, snuck right up into the story with an ease and grace I feel was either genius or wonderfully accidental!

It even went so far as to have this great scientific philosophy wrap-up detailed in only a few pages as to why all life on our future Earth had evolved so, and where it was quickly heading. One theory really made sense to me and made me think Brian was either a mad scientist-turned-author or had an LSD trip one evening that sent his thoughts off to the moon like a rocket, and somehow either remembered it, or, wrote part of it down, incorporating it into this sci-fi fantasy story.

So, I'm giving it a final rating of 4 stars for the fact it got better and better as I got more into it, culminating in a very enjoyable read I couldn't put down, and, call it material reasons if you will, for all the beautiful imagery I got in my head while reading it, along with the gorgeous paintings and artwork associated with this novel.

Don't get me wrong. It had several things I could've done without, especially the 'tummy-belly' men, some horrible names as I said earlier, and the writing sometimes had me wondering if it was translated from a different language into English because it often felt disjointed, and I would've really liked to have had more focus on certain creatures other than a few that were in the story too much, but, it was very entertaining and makes me crave a sequel or something similar.

*Here are a few books said to be of the same sub-genre.

description

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Jun 03, 2015 Michael rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, post-apocalyptic, netgalley, nature

I was surprised how much I liked this riot of imagination of post-humans clinging to survival in a world where plants have taken over. Millions of years from now when the sun has gotten hotter and the earth’s rotation is locked to keep one side always in its rays, the kingdom of plants has outcompeted animals for all the niches, evolving carnivorous and motile forms of seeming infinite variety. Humans have adapted to short brutish lives as small green creatures amid the jungle canopy.

The danger I was surprised how much I liked this riot of imagination of post-humans clinging to survival in a world where plants have taken over. Millions of years from now when the sun has gotten hotter and the earth’s rotation is locked to keep one side always in its rays, the kingdom of plants has outcompeted animals for all the niches, evolving carnivorous and motile forms of seeming infinite variety. Humans have adapted to short brutish lives as small green creatures amid the jungle canopy.

The dangers are many, but with tribal knowledge and teamwork and enough focus on breeding some form of human life persists when nearly all other vertebrates and even most insects have become extinct. The action is nearly non-stop, with one set of characters falling by the wayside as we follow one couple go from one frying pan to the fire in places beyond the forest they know. These include alternate ecologies near the sea, the twilight zones between perpetual light and dark, and even a journey to the moon.

My knowledge of biology often stretched my ability to suspend disbelief, but I was able to keep riding on metaphorical or allegorical truths about things in human nature we take for granted. The value of cultural knowledge is left somewhat ambiguous. On one hand, the need for constant wariness against so many predators and parasites keeps these future humans so tuned into the present, there is little room for dwelling on higher or long term purposes to life. Through the somewhat silly device of a telepathic fungus that can glean genetic memories of humans of the past, one character gains some perspective. He seems doomed to die quick because of his tendency to try new ways of solving problems of survival, but such new strategies were for him the only to keep ahead of the game.

The book succeeds for me on its lasting psychological feelings about teeming life forms and its atmospherics of horror and wonder over the precariousness of the life of an individual and our species. After recent reads of science books on the current human caused threats to biological diversity of the planet, it was fascinating for me to experience a scenario where excessive diversity among plants puts us almost out of the picture.

I appreciate the publisher taking a chance on the re-release of this classic from 1961. It was provided to me as an e-book through the Netgalley program.

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Feb 06, 2015 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, sci-fi, worldbuilding-sf, biopunk

I'm really impressed with this 1962 classic. I was fully prepared to assume it would be outdated and skimpy on the characters, but what I actually got was a thought-provoking tale that was so heavy on the worldbuilding that the worldbuilding was more like three or four characters in its own right.

I mean, you know its some serious science fiction if we're transported a billion years in the future, where men and women are a fifth our current size, where the earth and the moon are locked to constan I'm really impressed with this 1962 classic. I was fully prepared to assume it would be outdated and skimpy on the characters, but what I actually got was a thought-provoking tale that was so heavy on the worldbuilding that the worldbuilding was more like three or four characters in its own right.

I mean, you know its some serious science fiction if we're transported a billion years in the future, where men and women are a fifth our current size, where the earth and the moon are locked to constantly face the sun and the world had devolved and mixed and blurred lines between animals and vegetables. The prose was more than strong enough to prevent such a monstrosity of a novel from collapsing, filled with tantalizing images of truly odd creatures and situations I can barely guess at.

I only had a few issues with some of the characters. Some of the species of man were really dumb, and that was kind of the point, but I just couldn't believe that they'd have no sense of self-preservation. That point irked me. But other than that, I understood why the main characters didn't get much of a chance to grow or change. It was an outright adventure novel, exploring new lands, trying to survive while being driven by the mortal enemy of mankind.... his brain.

My god, that aspect of this novel was pretty damn cool. Mankind entered into a contract with a parasite that gave us our intelligence in the deep past. A fungus that, when combined with another living creature, makes it smarter. With time, it moved from being a crown of spongy fungus that looked like a brain to inhabit the slowly enlarged cavity of our modern heads, until all man thought this was the natural order. When the sun aged and became deadly to the fungus, mankind fell into the state of beasts again.

To have a hardy and evolved fungus drop upon you in the middle of the jungle to give you heightened intelligence, you'd think that would be a good thing, right?

Intelligence is overrated. :)

What a mess it caused for Gren.

The world was fantastic, spanning from spiderwebs that spanned between the earth and the moon, twilight zones where wolfmen roam, trees that shoot fire, and fishmen that rise up from the waters to preach about civilization and the coming nova of our sun. Too cool.

There's one more thing. These stories were written in 1961 before they were put together as one novel the next year. As I was reading it, I kept thinking to myself that this novel was the inspiration for Dune. The Morel could access our genetic memories into the deep past. The ecological concerns were breathtaking and very well thought out and developed, whether or not they're inaccurate. There were so many links and ties between the two novels that I had to put it down and do a little research. I kept assuming that this was a homage to Dune, for heaven's sake. Nope. It came out 4 years before Dune, and does an awesome job at outperforming Dune in these ways.

Is that high praise? Yes. Do I see why one of the short stories that made up this novel won the Hugo in '62? Yes. Can I imagine that during the 5 year time that Frank Herbert was writing Dune, he got inspired while reading the magazines these stories were published? Yes.

What a fantastic coincidence. :) ...more

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Nov 07, 2014 Claudia rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, a-hugo

Although I can’t say this one is a favorite of mine, like Helliconia Trilogy, it sure left a strong impression on me.

Millions of years in the future, Earth stopped spinning and it’s tidally locked with the Sun, which is in its last days, before turning into a supernova and burn itself and its surroundings out. Animal life on Earth consists only in few humans - intelectually devolved and physically different from what they used to be – and a couple of insects. Vegetation covers the whole planet, Although I can’t say this one is a favorite of mine, like Helliconia Trilogy, it sure left a strong impression on me.

Millions of years in the future, Earth stopped spinning and it’s tidally locked with the Sun, which is in its last days, before turning into a supernova and burn itself and its surroundings out. Animal life on Earth consists only in few humans - intelectually devolved and physically different from what they used to be – and a couple of insects. Vegetation covers the whole planet, plants are now omnivores and grown to unimaginable sizes and shapes. The jungle is formed from just one banyan tree which covers the entire Earth and within its branches and leaves numerous perils lie. Moon is connected to Earth through giant cobwebs, spin by mile-long plant-spiders, which act like a space elevators.

The worldbuilding is stupendous; the images are so vivid and well drawn, that one cannot but be amazed by it. And in this green world live the degenerate humans, green and small, reduced to primary instincts and trying to survive among all these enormous and great dangers.

Even though I loved the worldbuilding, the characters put me off. The various tribes, reduced to stupid creatures, were quite hard to root for. The tummybellies, which are supposed to be the fun part of the story, are the most annoying and I couldn’t help resonating with Gren, our main character, on this, even if I didn’t approve on his behaviour.

Actually, the main course of action is the journey of Gren, one strong-willed tribesman, which takes a different path away from his fellows. We follow him in his adventures, encounters, near death experiences and most of all, his symbiotic relation with a morel.

And although I didn’t like the language, the behavior, the way the characters are shaped, I must admit they are perfectly integrated in the world. But I am just stating my enjoyment on the characters, which was rather low, than criticizing the way they are developed.

One fact I found to be very interesting and I was glad for the epilogue Aldiss wrote in this edition, because otherwise I might have never known this. The author lived many years in India and was particularly impressed by the great banyan tree which now occupies more than 4 acres (2 acres when Aldiss came across it) and looks like a forest; this majestic tree was the inspiration for this book:

More info in it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gre...

Bottom line is that, even if I loved the worldbuilding and the message it carries, that Nature is the mighty ruler of this planet which will evolve and survive no matter what and humanity is just a tiny, insignificant speck in its kingdom, the characters annoyed me to no end; hence the three stars.
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Dec 27, 2015 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, science-fiction

There is a trick to beginning reviews, and it's a pity that I've never learnt it.

My early impression reading this 1960 science fiction novel set on Earth in a far future, when our plant's rotation has stalled and weird, dynamic forms of vegetable life are dominant, leaving the rest - tiny humans, wasps, termites and a few others to battle on as best they can was to feel the similarities with J G Ballard's The Drowned World. Both imagine a future world that in some ways is more similar to the pre There is a trick to beginning reviews, and it's a pity that I've never learnt it.

My early impression reading this 1960 science fiction novel set on Earth in a far future, when our plant's rotation has stalled and weird, dynamic forms of vegetable life are dominant, leaving the rest - tiny humans, wasps, termites and a few others to battle on as best they can was to feel the similarities with J G Ballard's The Drowned World. Both imagine a future world that in some ways is more similar to the prehistoric past, the (Jungian?) notion of an inherited species memory is important in both, and the importance of the time that both authors spent in the Far East - Ballard as a boy, Aldiss - if I remember correctly - as part of his military service, is not something that you have to lift stones to see.

Both, and I suspect that is a particularly sharp feature in British writing when there is not just the taking into account of the reality of living with the possibility of destruction through atomic war but also an adaptation to the loss of Empire, have a sense of human societies and civilisations as transitory. Here I make plain my view that science fiction and fantasy writing is never about the fantastic nor the fictional possibilities of science but about contemporary concerns. In Aldiss this is a theme that is there also in Earthworks and most richly expressed in The Helliconia Trilogy. Aldiss here though doesn't have the same fixation that early Ballard does on the dramatic and sudden transition from one state to another. Aldiss's interest in the temporary and contingent nature of our human lives, I feel is more philosophical and certainly more abstract than Ballards which is as visceral as you would expect given his experiences as related in a slightly fictionalised form in Empire of the Sun. But I may well be misleading myself on the basis of Aldiss beginning and ending The Helliconia Trilogy with quotations from Lucretius, which no doubt predisposed me to assume an equally philosophical turn to Aldiss' mind.

Yet we could cut apart the cake in another couple of ways. Looking back we also have the example of H G Wells (view spoiler) and his concern with the far future of humanity, and further back with Mary Shelley's The Last Man. This I suppose could be expressed as: repent, for the end of the world is nigh or indeed as this.

For me a more satisfying slice is to be had by considering Hothouse as a response to the Far East, rather as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy is a response to his youth in China and then having to learn to live in Britain. This presents it's own difficulties, as Aldiss writes here "whereas I had adjusted to the squalor and poverty of India, I hated the squalor and poverty, allied to the depressing climate, of my homeland" (p270). I'm not sure if it is a case of the author having to use fiction as a way of expressing the alien quality of another land and other people for themselves, or seizing on fiction as the best way to make us readers experience those alien qualities, but for me writing this today Hothouse is a fictional response to coming in to the real presence of a banyan tree. And for me that holds open a new promise of creativity - for what art will be created when people come from the land of the Banyan tree to the north sea islands with their soft and dismal drizzle, fried fish and steak and kidney pudding? What deep terrors, ancient anxieties or even wild hopes will they then need to impress upon the people they return to at home?

The story is also remarkable for its semi-sinister sentient fungus, & it's 'ignorance is bliss' ending, shown as preferable to species blending with a mind altering mushroom. ...more

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Jan 14, 2015 Stuart rated it liked it

Shelves: dying-earth, classic-sf, fantastic-weird

Hothouse: Plant creatures gone wild! Human characters wooden
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature

Yeah, Hothouse (1962) was definitely written with some chemical assistance. Maybe some LSD-spiked vegetable juice? It may have been written as a set of five short stories in 1961, but it’s a timeless and bizarre story of a million years in the future when the plants have completely taken over the planet, which has stopped rotating, and humans are little green creatures hustling to avoid becoming pl Hothouse: Plant creatures gone wild! Human characters wooden
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature

Yeah, Hothouse (1962) was definitely written with some chemical assistance. Maybe some LSD-spiked vegetable juice? It may have been written as a set of five short stories in 1961, but it’s a timeless and bizarre story of a million years in the future when the plants have completely taken over the planet, which has stopped rotating, and humans are little green creatures hustling to avoid becoming plant food.

There are hundreds of fearsome carnivorous plants that would love to eat human morsels, but will gladly settle for eating each other instead. As the planet has come to a stop, a massive banyan tree now covers the sunny-side of the planet, with all other plants surviving in it’s shade. But there are gargantuan plant-based spiders called traversers who dwell above the plant layer and actually spin webs across space to the moon and other planets. Yeah, the science here is, well, complete and utter bollocks! But who cares when you can come up with the most bizzare plant species ever conceived in an amazing dying earth setting?

And this book never lets up on the crazy vegetable creatures and pitiful rat-like humans. The main characters are continuously fleeing from one crisis to the next, and never have the upper hand. They encounter the most annoying creatures ever created, including the tummy-belly men, whose speech mannerisms make Jar-Jar Binks sound like Shakespeare. Then there is the fish creature carried by a crippled human called the Catch-Carry-Kind, a prophet who knows the sun is dying and Earth is doomed. He has great wisdom but meets his match with an intelligent, parasitic fungus called a Morel. In fact, the fungi is really a pretty fun-…no, I won’t go there. But, Aldiss was definitely tripping on some fecund and fertile thoughts.

However, his human characters and dialogue are dreadful! This is the most amazing world-building but the most god-awful characters ever created. The storyline is so episodic it drove me crazy, but the malevolent Black Mouth with its irresistible siren cry and a brooding cliff with a 1,000 staring eyes were so cool that I was rooting against the puny humans. If only some other author like Jack Vance were allowed to use this world (like the Dying Earth), this could have been a contender. Oh, the humanity…or is it vegetality?

Aldiss’ Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), and Greybeard (1964) were chosen by David Pringle for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, and they’ve been on my TBR list for years. In fact, the five short stories that make up Hothouse collectively were awarded the 1962 Hugo for Best Short Fiction. Last year I tried to read Non-Stop, one of the original generational starship stories, but I found the characters so clumsily-drawn that I couldn’t get past the first 100 pages. I don’t want to make an unfair assessment, but I feel that Aldiss, who has some great ideas, really isn’t very gifted in the characterization department. He’s been a major figure in British SF, and wrote a well-regarded history of the SF genre called Trillion Year Spree (2001), but I feel like he’s not one of the top authors from the 1960s. ...more

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Jan 13, 2012 Henry Avila rated it liked it · review of another edition

In the far distant future with the dying Sun above, all the Earth has been overrun by vegetation.Old Sol stays in the same position in the sky.Shining on half the Earth. The other part is a frozen wasteland ,in perpetual darkness...It's a plant world for sure.The few humans left, have returned to the trees,(there is just one,a Banyan, in reality), and turned green, the humans I mean.A "Hothouse" (the name of the novel originally), in fact Terra has become.These people are primitive.Living high a ...more

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Apr 30, 2015 Althea Ann rated it did not like it

It's not just pulp fiction - it's vegetable-pulp fiction!

Long aeons in Earth's future, an Age of Plants has risen. Dangerous, carnivorous plants are everywhere - some species are even mobile hunters! The remaining humans are a dwarfed, shrunken species. With greatly reduced intelligence and a simple, tribal lifestyle, they struggle to stay alive long enough to maintain their population.

It's an interesting premise... sadly, the execution is, quite frankly, terrible. The writing is clunky. The plo
It's not just pulp fiction - it's vegetable-pulp fiction!

Long aeons in Earth's future, an Age of Plants has risen. Dangerous, carnivorous plants are everywhere - some species are even mobile hunters! The remaining humans are a dwarfed, shrunken species. With greatly reduced intelligence and a simple, tribal lifestyle, they struggle to stay alive long enough to maintain their population.

It's an interesting premise... sadly, the execution is, quite frankly, terrible. The writing is clunky. The plot, practically non-existent. The characters are (at times, quite literally) interchangeable, with no depth or even an attempt at giving them individual personalities. Basically, there's a group of these future humans, and they wander around, encountering one monster or other hazard after another, and gradually getting picked off.

The main raison-d'etre of the book is to imaginatively describe these alien organisms, one after another. They're created from a purely fantastic perspective, not an actual 'scientific speculation' attempt. Nothing about the world described makes any logical sense. That's fine - except nothing about the book is strong enough to carry it as a fantasy, either.

It's also quite offensively sexist. Not in the way of many golden-age SF books, with nubile alien slave girls and sexy sorceresses - I love those! No, it's more of an insidious and constant flow of: every time an incident is portrayed, the female characters are less intelligent, less assertive, more timid, unable to come up with their own ideas, shown as interchangeable as lovers. Hey, they're good at 'giving comfort' though. Even though the future society, we are told, is matriarchal, it's the male characters that have to take charge in every situation and are the main 'do-ers' throughout. It is very clear that Aldiss never even considered that a woman might bother to read his book.

The content here was originally published in five installments in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1961. Unbelievably, they were collectively awarded a Hugo for 'Best Short Fiction.' An abridged version was previously published as 'The Long Afternoon of Earth.' ...more

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Nov 27, 2008 Manny rated it liked it

Shelves: too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts

Hallucinatory 60s novel, possibly written on drugs, which depicts a far-future Earth in which humans have evolved into tiny creatures who live in a giant forest that covers the globe. Oh, and there are spider-webs that stretch up to the moon... a sort of biological space elevator. Read the book to find out what the deal is with the fungi. None of it makes sense, but the images are striking.

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Jul 14, 2016 Ivana Books Are Magic rated it really liked it

This book might give you a tan, if you’re the suggestive type. I mean if you really imagine yourself being in this hot, hot, hot world. I’m only kidding, but really I don’t know, maybe it is even plausible, people do it with self-hypnosis, don’t they? When I was in high school, I read mostly SF (when it came to books of my own selection). We had to read a lot of classic for school (our state school curriculum is such) so I guess that a part of me was looking for something different. But it could This book might give you a tan, if you’re the suggestive type. I mean if you really imagine yourself being in this hot, hot, hot world. I’m only kidding, but really I don’t know, maybe it is even plausible, people do it with self-hypnosis, don’t they? When I was in high school, I read mostly SF (when it came to books of my own selection). We had to read a lot of classic for school (our state school curriculum is such) so I guess that a part of me was looking for something different. But it could also be that, back then, I loved SF for the same reasons I love it now (for the power of its imagination, depth of its philosophy and in some case for its science- I’m not really fluent in science but I do know something about it and probably I awe that something to SF). Anyhow, I do remember enjoying reading this novel way back and it stayed in my mind ever since. I even remember discussing this book with friends, especially that fungus concept (I’ll get into that later). So, imagine how happy I was when my brother gave me this book for Christmas and it was such a pretty edition too. Now I can re-read it whenever I feel like it.

Hothouse is set in future. Far, far away kind of future- with practically no ties with our civilization as we know it. Here are the facts of this new world that bears almost no resemblance to our own. The Earth has stopped rotating (that part is not very plausible but hey you can’t have it all) a while back hence life on Earth is now very different from our own. The sun has been growing and growing, until it has grown enormous. So, as the Sun approaches its natural end, the life on Earth is mostly plant life engaged in a crazy frenzy of eating and being eaten, speedy growth and decay, something like a tropical forest on steroids. It’s a jungle of the wildest sort and the writer does a great job describing it. Is there a place for us in this crazy place?
What happens with the humans? Human beings are small in size, they’re only a fraction of our present size. That’s not the most significant change at all. Human evolution seems to have taken a back tour, so mentally these humans have returned to the early days of human civilization- organized in tribes ruled by matriarchs and being driven mostly by their instincts. These humans don’t ponder much, when they face loss and death, they shrug their shoulders and move on. They live in a fast-paced jungle where there is no time for mediation. Not if you want to survive. Consequently, our protagonists have little time to experience any deep thoughts, being mainly preoccupied with staying alive. That's the beginning of the story.

The story that develops soon after the start, makes this novel quite a page-turner! It is all very exciting stuff. Right from the beginning to the end, the novel is action packed- there's always something going on. The character's development is somewhat limited, possibly due to them being somewhat limited in terms of intelligence themselves. However, there is some character development, so it is not like it is only action, all the time. It is true that these tiny humans start of as being little more than animals, but they do progress to some extent and they're likeable. They do the best they can and in many ways, they hold onto their humanity- that’s the feeling I got anyway. Their lives often end tragically- yes, there are some tragic moments but there is stubbornness in them that doesn’t seem to be all due to survival instincts. I felt there is more than instincts to them, more complexity. In other words, I felt that the characters of Hothouse had soul and I liked them.

So, what do you do when you have this premise in which humans aren’t highly intelligent but you still want to make an interesting dialogue? Well, you invent a way in which one of the protagonist suddenly becomes smarter (and with no help from personal evolution because that wouldn’t make sense in the story). The fungus (or the morel)- what a brilliant idea! The morel is a sentient fungus that enhances the intelligence of creatures it forms symbiotic relationships with. I guess it could also be called a parasite. It isn’t exactly friendly. The whole concept of this smart fungus fascinated me. There is even an indication that that is how people became smart in the first place- and it was a cheeky and fun (if not a credible) idea. As a thing, character or villain- I don't know what to call it-it's well-though and incorporated into a story. Those parts when the fungus tried to take over the life of one of the protagonists was probably my favourite part of the novel.

One of the things I absolutely loved about this novel were the vivid descriptions of this future world. I had a feeling like I got a tan while I was reading this book. The author is so wildly imaginative when he writes about different life forms. I think that biologists would enjoy this one. You almost feel like you’re watching a really great nature documentary. It feels that real! There is originally both in the setting and in the story. That feeling of life growing fanatically in the final days of a dying sun- it’s there, you can feel it. That is what I loved the most. I really felt a part of this world.

Hothouse is not exactly hard sf, but it's really fun to read. It has many twists and turns. It makes you feel for the characters. It develops a great and exciting story. I've read somewhere that the editor sought scientific advice about the scientific aspect of the book ( the part about the planet standing still) and that he had been told that the orbital dynamics involved meant that it was nonsense, but the image of the earth and moon side by side in orbit, shrouded with cobwebs woven by giant vegetable spiders, was so outrageous and appealing that he published it anyway. He made the right decision! This novel is a gem. It is amazingly original and widely imaginative. Highly recommended to all SF fans! It is such a unique and valuable work in this genre.
...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Adam rated it really liked it

Shelves: scifi

If you put aside the shoddy science and employ your suspension of disbelief to the fullest, than this is a blast of a story. A distant future where humans are hunted by evolved plants and giant insects in a world that resembles a giant rainforest. I had so much fun reading about the setting that I didn't even care that the plot was flimsy. This is a fun tour through a very imaginative landscape.

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May 15, 2015 Sara J. (kefuwa) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

One of my first memories of childhood was a trip to the planetarium at Jodrell Bank and the ending sequence of the 'presentation' was where they showed the theorised last stages of our Sun's life as a star with it's eventual supernova and decline into a red dwarf before inevitably dying out. That, for some strange reason, fascinated me terribly in an almost nightmarish way for weeks on end... all life on earth wiped out by a supernova - expanding sun swallows up the nearby planets! But the incre One of my first memories of childhood was a trip to the planetarium at Jodrell Bank and the ending sequence of the 'presentation' was where they showed the theorised last stages of our Sun's life as a star with it's eventual supernova and decline into a red dwarf before inevitably dying out. That, for some strange reason, fascinated me terribly in an almost nightmarish way for weeks on end... all life on earth wiped out by a supernova - expanding sun swallows up the nearby planets! But the increased radiation alone would have wiped us out long before it went supernova? Eh?

Anyhow. Hothouse is set somewhere along that time, the sun is super hot and on it's last leg. The plant kingdom has taken over riotously and humanity has evolved (or should I say devolved) into... Little. Green. Men.

[cue image]

Literally. Also - the earth doesn't spin on it's axis anymore is tidally attached to the sun so that one half is perpetual day and the other perpetual night. Also, there are HUUUUGE spiders that spin webs between earth and the moon. o_O I kid you not.

Sound almost ridiculous. But who is to know that far into the future... I would have thought nothing would have survived the radiation and anything living would have to be underground or deep in the sea. But I digress.

The opening sequence and subsequent introduction to this world comes in the form of the most basic unit of humanity at the time - a matriarchal family unit of several adults and their offspring. Their forays brought to mind scenes from "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" with the climbing of giant stalks and nightmarish giant insects - but with, more often than not, less forgiving and more lethal repercussions - one wrong move equals death (and there are deaths aplenty).

While the first quarter focuses on this unit - the story, I feel, (eventually) ends up as a vehicle to transport us on a trip around the world to as many diverse locales & expose us to as many weird creatures as possible. And boy does it get weird. There is some great world building going on here. This part of the story almost brought to mind a Jules Verne's-esque fantastical quality of never before seen/unexplored frontiers. Though that could just be due to the talking fungus' encyclopaedic urge to explain everything. Yes, we also have talking fungus. Among other things... so many other things.

After finishing it the only thought I had was... wow. What madness was that? Great stuff. The stuff of talking fungus' (may I never know their kind).

Rating this I am torn between giving it a 4 (I really like it) and 5 (It was AMAZING)... it it definitely a 4 for me... but falls just a bit short of a 5. It was AMAZING in the purely fantastically mind boggling imaginative sense... but a bit too fantastic maybe (plus I should mention the devolved dialogue of some of the devolved specie does grate a bit after awhile). So... a 4.5?

*Originally Hothouse consisted of 5 short stories serialised in a magazine and eventually published as a whole. These 5 short stories were collectively awarded the 1962 Hugo Award for short fiction.

Disclaimer: I got this from Netgalley for the Open Road Media release of this novel. ...more

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Nov 06, 2011 Ivana rated it really liked it

I remember enjoying reading this novel way back in high school. Recently when it was given to me as a present, I had a chance to reread it- and I really liked it again.

Hothouse is set in far, far future. The sun has grown enormous as it approaches its end, and the life on Earth (that has stopped rotating around the sun btw)is mostly plant life engaged in a crazy frenzy of eating and being eaten, speedy growth and decay, something like a tropical forest on steroids. Human beings are small and me I remember enjoying reading this novel way back in high school. Recently when it was given to me as a present, I had a chance to reread it- and I really liked it again.

Hothouse is set in far, far future. The sun has grown enormous as it approaches its end, and the life on Earth (that has stopped rotating around the sun btw)is mostly plant life engaged in a crazy frenzy of eating and being eaten, speedy growth and decay, something like a tropical forest on steroids. Human beings are small and mentally they've returned to the early days of human civilization- organized in tribes ruled by matriarchs and being driven by their instincts. They live in a fast pace jungle and have little time to experience any deep thoughts, being mainly preoccupied with staying alive. That's the beginning.

The story that develops soon after the start, makes this novel a page-turner, from the beginning to the end, the novel is action packed- there's always something going on. The character's development is somewhat limited in terms of intelligence, they start of as being little more than animals, but they do progress to some extent and they're likeable. They do the best they can and often it ends tragically- yes, there are tragic moments.

The fungus (or the morel)- what a brilliant idea! The morel is a sentient fungus that enhances the intelligence of creatures it forms symbiotic relationships with.( There is even an indication that that is how people became smart in the first place)As a thing, character or villain- I don't know what to call it-it's well-though and incorporated into a story.

The best part about the novel are the descriptions, the author is so wildly imaginative when he writes about different life forms. You almost feel like you’re watching a really great nature documentary. There is originally in this story. The feeling of life growing fanatically in the final days of a dying sun- it’s there.

Hothouse is not exactly hard sf, but it's really fun to read. I've read somewhere that the editor sought scientific advice about the scientific aspect of the book( the part about the planet standing still) and that he had been told that the orbital dynamics involved meant that it was nonsense, but the image of the earth and moon side by side in orbit, shrouded with cobwebs woven by giant vegetable spiders, was so outrageous and appealing that he published it anyway. He made the right decision!
...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Ben rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi-and-fantasy

Written in 1962, Brian Aldiss' Hothouse is similar to works like Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. In most novels of this dying earth genre, the world is gasping under the weight of civilization; a million years of customs and artifacts, countless empires risen and fallen, cities piled upon cities. In Hothouse, it's nature, not culture which dominates the last days of Man.

Far in the future, under a swollen red sun, the Earth and Moon have long since dragged Written in 1962, Brian Aldiss' Hothouse is similar to works like Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. In most novels of this dying earth genre, the world is gasping under the weight of civilization; a million years of customs and artifacts, countless empires risen and fallen, cities piled upon cities. In Hothouse, it's nature, not culture which dominates the last days of Man.

Far in the future, under a swollen red sun, the Earth and Moon have long since dragged each other to a halt, leaving one side of Earth permanently lit and the other in permanent darkness. Under the plentiful radiation on the lit side, plants have become the primary inhabitants of the land, diversifying into thousands of forms to fill every available ecological niche. Of the animal kingdom, only a few species remain: one or two insect-like predators, and a much-altered humanity. These humans are tribal hunter-gatherers, living in the canopy of a continent-spanning forest.

The novel follows Gren, who is forced out of his tribe (for, essentially, excessive cleverness) and so begins a journey to seek a new home. Actually, "journey" is perhaps too charitable. Gren is more often driven from place to place by forces he can't control. Early in the novel, he is infected by a parasitic, sentient fungus which slowly takes control of his mind and plans to use Gren to conquer the world. Over the course of the book, Gren travels to the dark side of the Earth, meets a variety of strange creatures, is helped and threatened to various degrees, manages to free himself from the fungus, returns with the fungus--now as a sort of advisory partner--to the light side, is given the choice to flee the first stages of the sun's explosion by riding to the stars inside an interstellar spider-plant, and chooses ultimately to return to the jungle and make babies because--hey--he'll be dead by the time the s**t hits the fan in any case.

We see much of this strange world through Gren's eyes, and he knows no more than any of his race. Many things he encounters during his journey remain mysterious, though some of human history is glimpsed in flashback as the mushroom probes (somewhat improbably) through Gren's racial memories, and at times it is possible to guess at the possible origins of species or artifacts.

In addition to being delightfully strange, Hothouse takes full advantage of the philosophical possibilities of the Dying Earth setting. The fungus, perhaps, stands in for one part of contemporary human nature: though it is clearly base, cruel, selfish, perhaps even evil--it ultimately is the key to whatever salvation humanity is offered. Our hero, too, is no noble Odysseus; he is often petty, mean, or irresponsible. Yet for all that, or perhaps because of it, he seems more human than his companions--who are generally either passive or completely incomprehensible. The nature of time is also explored: the end of the world is an intellectual threat to the fungus, merely one more incomprehensible event to Gren, who wants mostly to find a good tree and settle down with a woman or two. The end of time, while tragic and romantic, is also suggested as a kind of rebirth. The "green streamers…." escaping from the planet as it dies are beautiful, and it's hard not to read hope into them. As one phase passes, so another begins.

These are not particularly profound observations, although they do place the book in the realm of "cerebral" SF. But for me, the greatest achievement of Hothouse is in its depiction of a nature "green in tooth and claw" as Aldiss puts it in the book. Science fiction does not lack for scary monsters; many-tentacled aliens are a dime a dozen. But the biological horror of a relentless, vegetal Earth is something memorable. I find Venus Flytraps slightly unsettling, and a little malevolent. Hothouse takes that feeling and multiplies it to fill a planetary landscape. ...more

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Dec 03, 2014 Stephen Curran rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-from-penguin-mod-classics-list

As the dying sun blasts out immense levels of radiation, plant life has taken undeniable supremacy of the earth. The land is dominated by a single banyan tree that grows as high as the skyline, while the coast is populated with giant, battling seaweed. Above it all, a spider-like breed of traversers sling webs back and forth to the immobile moon: 'vegetable astronaughts huge and insensible'.

Yup.

Reading Hothouse is like experiencing one of those all-too-occasional vivid dreams that are so richly ...more

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Nov 29, 2010 Rhys rated it really liked it · review of another edition

One of the best novels I have read this year. In fact I think it is the best novel I read in 2010. Brian Aldiss' second SF novel, less intricate in terms of plot than many of his other books, but packed full of highly original ideas and very strange situations. The main character, Gren, embarks on a journey in a far-future version of Earth where the sun has grown vast in the sky and carnivorous plants have come to dominate the food-chain. Imagine The Day of the Triffids on a truly global scale w ...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Jamie Rose rated it liked it · review of another edition

I found this really hard to rate. It is extremely odd and not so much a story with characters as much as a fantastical travelogue. Some of the more comic scenes reminded me of Candide (recently read, fresh in the memory!) in the 'buffoons in an allegory' stakes, but Hothouse is also in turn violent and nightmarish, hallucinatory in the extreme (an accidental astral journey through the cosmos via a psychic building anyone?), hugely inventive and quite often really gross. Science fiction is I gues ...more

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Mar 12, 2015 Chris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, netgalley

Tens of thousands of years into the future, the Earth's rotation has locked, with one face locked on a dying sun, the other side locked in orbit with a moon now encrusted with plant life. Due to high doses of solar radiation, life on Earth has devolved and mutated. Humans now occupy the lowest rank on the totem pole, shriveled and out-classed by the remaining insect life and the numerous forms of flora. For the plant world has evolved and gained sentience---it is the age of the vegetable, and hu Tens of thousands of years into the future, the Earth's rotation has locked, with one face locked on a dying sun, the other side locked in orbit with a moon now encrusted with plant life. Due to high doses of solar radiation, life on Earth has devolved and mutated. Humans now occupy the lowest rank on the totem pole, shriveled and out-classed by the remaining insect life and the numerous forms of flora. For the plant world has evolved and gained sentience---it is the age of the vegetable, and humanity is in its twilight years. The webs of great spider-like plants called Traversers link the Earth to the moon. A massive banyan tree covers the sun-light face of the Earth, and in its branches a million dramas of life, death, and decay unfold... such as the plight of a small tribe of humans. Leader Lily-yo opts to disband her tribe and travel "Up," the adults tying themselves to a traverser's web. Abandoned by the adults, the children of the tribe must make their own fate in the Green. The story follows one of the tribe's few man-children, Gren, and the epic voyage he undertakes. Along the way, he will encounter many strange perils, gain (and lose) companions, become the host to a parasitic morel mushroom that has evolved sentience, and uncover some of this world's many secrets.

What's most impressive about Hothouse is the astounding creativity of its setting---the various kinds of floral fauna that inhabit this world, the descriptions of the world-tree, and we get to see plenty of it on the characters' journey. Aldiss' first novel, Non-Stop, featured a number of uniquely creative if off-the-wall ideas, and Hothouse is even more off-the-wall craziness cut from the same cloth. Carnivorous plants, tiny humans, giant insects, a tree that occupies most of the rotational-locked Earth, spider-like plants whose webbing has ensnared the moon... It's all a bit much, a jumble of crazed and hallucinogenic ideas that defy realistic science; really, it falls more under the dreaded science-fantasy label. (It reminds me of Vance's Dying Earth, particularly the Cugel stories, and Hodgson's The Night Land. With plants.) For sheer amazing ideas and sensawunda, the book more than delivers. Its world enthralled me, the deadly struggles of a small band of humans, insignificant in the wide expanse of killer plants. Aldiss does a magnificent job showing how wild and unpredictable the world is, making his human characters all but overwhelmed by their environment. It's a breathtaking and visionary novel, and the main reason to read it is for that outrageous setting.

The novel's downsides, though, are many. Its origin as five novelettes is very obvious, because the pacing can be pretty jerky and is full of repetition---I doubt the stories were edited much when they were combined into one fixup novel, and you can see the seams whenever key pieces of information are repeated five pages later. The plot... doesn't really exist; the novel is a kind of picaresque journey through a hellish environment, the plot is neither engrossing or well-defined. It's less like a novel and more like a furious struggle for survival, everyday hazards in an alien future. At times it felt like a B-movie or video game, with every paragraph featuring a new threat to overcome and with characters dying or being abandoned every other chapter---it's great at showing how wild and unpredictable the world is, how insignificant and vulnerable the humans are, but gets to be a bit much after a while.

The characters have some issues as well. Most of them disappear in short succession---Lily-yo and the adults ascend to the moon and are left on a cliffhanger, Toy and most of the group wander off into the green, so don't get attached to them. Instead, we're left with Gren, the man-child, who is not very likable: he becomes something of a jerk after he gains his magic morel, gets worse when he realizes that it's manipulating him, and by the end of the novel Gren's stopped making inspiring speeches and is relying on physical violence and threats to get others to act. Great guy. And as if the magic morel isn't out there enough, it digs into Gren's mind and discovers some racial memories, which is another knock against the book's science.

Hothouse's core themes are some that Aldiss explored in many of his novels and short stories---the balance of fecundity to entropy, the interrelation between order and chaos, and the stark contrast between an explosive growth of life and the inevitable silence of death and decay. The forest is a microcosm of these themes; each creature---plant, human, or insect---exists to eat and procreate, gathering energy and spreading its offspring, attempting to spread their genetic material wide. (Take the traversers, which are drawn by the pull of solar radiation, taking them to the moon and the silence of space.). At the end, all creatures fall back down to the green, to become compost for more forms of life---the plants exist in a cyclical life of death and rebirth, with each death contributing to another's growth. The humans, meanwhile, are stuck on the death end; unlike the tangled jungles of the hothouse world, they don't benefit much from the death of one of their adversaries. At best it is food, or a moment's respite before the onslaught of another predator. Life is a tangled mess of interlocking cycles, a mass of chaos from first glance that hides the structure and order of the kill-or-be-killed jungle.

Hothouse all but requires its readers to suspend disbelief, and if you're more into Hard SF or less into science-fantasy, it's probably best to give it a skip. But for sheer creativity and uniqueness, it is unparalleled. Hothouse is a tour-de-force of world-building, a detailed and perilous journey through a bizarre and unsettling future. I very much enjoyed it, though I can understand why others might not.

Full review, and other reviews of classic SF, can be found on my blog. ...more

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Apr 29, 2015 Ana rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, dystopia, science-fiction, to-read-on-shelf, speculative-fiction, netgalley-read

https://anaslair.wordpress.com/2015/0...

I have to admit I had trouble connecting to Hothouse.

First, the characters. I was not a fan of the whole Tarzan vibe, although I understand it. There isn't much to these semi-savage humans but trying to survive, so it's natural that, with such a decreased intelligence, abilities would wither, and myth and tabu would rule their lives. I just did not appreciate much people dying so easily or getting separated, and it is no big deal because it is the way. So ...more

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Sep 04, 2017 Javier rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: ci-fi

Reconozco que tuve un percance con Aldiss en mis años mozos, cuando por azar cayó en mis manos Drácula desencadenado . El caso es que me dejó frío y casi de inmediato olvidé la trama, lo que me disuadió de seguir probando con otros libros suyos. Precipitación adolescente. Tras conocer la noticia de su fallecimiento y estar expuesto al (escaso) bombardeo que le siguió, decidí probar suerte con La nave estelar . Me lo pasé realmente bien leyéndolo, fascinado por su planteamiento y atrapado por e Reconozco que tuve un percance con Aldiss en mis años mozos, cuando por azar cayó en mis manos Drácula desencadenado . El caso es que me dejó frío y casi de inmediato olvidé la trama, lo que me disuadió de seguir probando con otros libros suyos. Precipitación adolescente. Tras conocer la noticia de su fallecimiento y estar expuesto al (escaso) bombardeo que le siguió, decidí probar suerte con La nave estelar . Me lo pasé realmente bien leyéndolo, fascinado por su planteamiento y atrapado por el ritmo trepidante de la acción. Y si ahora mismo me acercara a la sección de novedades de ciencia ficción de cualquier librería y cogiera diez o veinte títulos al azar, estoy seguro de que ninguno le llegaría a Invernáculo a la suela de los zapatos.

La rotación de la Tierra ha cesado y en sus hemisferios reinan el día y la noche permanentes. A medida que la radiación solar aumenta, el reino vegetal conquista toda la parte luminosa del planeta y la mayoría de especies animales se extingue o involuciona. En este mundo plagado de seres extraños y aterradores, los últimos humanos han olvidado su historia y se ocupan únicamente de sobrevivir en tribus aisladas. Bajo un sol agonizante a punto de convertirse en nova y arrasarlo todo, un grupo de personajes recorrerá las vastas regiones verdes hasta la cara oscura del planeta.

La novela es un derroche constante de imaginación que nunca deja de sorprender, capaz de crear un mundo completamente ajeno hasta en el lenguaje empleado (que los lectores españoles podemos disfrutar con una traducción a la altura gracias al trabajo de Matilde Horne). Aunque algunos de los motivos por los que quedará en mi recuerdo tienen que ver con circunstancias personales, a Invernáculo le sobra artillería para dejar una marca indeleble:

«Y aquellos innumerables filamentos flotaban a través de la separación, uniendo los mundos. Arriba y abajo, los traveseros podían desplazarse a voluntad, como enormes e insensibles astronautas vegetales, entre la Tierra y la luna, envueltas en una red indiferente. De un modo sorprendentemente adecuado, la vejez de la Tierra estaba envuelta en telarañas».

La imagen de dos mundos suspendidos en equilibrio perfecto, conectados mediante los hilos tejidos por unos aracnoides de dimensiones colosales que los utilizan para viajar entre ellos, posee tal potencia evocadora que por sí sola justifica haberle dado una oportunidad a Aldiss. ...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Ubik rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own

Not Aldiss' strongest for sure. The pacing was definitely not what I come to expect from him; at some points frenetic, and other times sluggish. I also expect more of a vibrancy in his choice of words. Aldiss usually has a way of making his words dance across the page for me. But everything was pretty plain here. I have a penchant for the "plants taking over the world" subgenre so all the lifeforms talked about in the novel were fascinating to me. It definitely kept me interested from page to pa ...more

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Nov 09, 2014 Valentina rated it liked it · review of another edition

I read this book, for a first time,a long time ago.
I remember that there wasn't any sense in plot,but whole story was so halucigenic that I couldn't put the damn thing away!
There was cyberplants,and crazy mutant insects,and elevator to moon...
I felt like bad acid trip...

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Jun 30, 2009 Zach rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, science-fiction

It's probably been close to a decade since I've read this book and the image of the earth and the moon shrouded together by gigantic spiderwebs still sticks with me.

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Jun 15, 2010 Martinxo rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, dad-s-books

Classic SF. Is this where Devo got the idea for de-evolution?

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Aug 29, 2011 Fungus Gnat rated it it was ok · review of another edition

“Hothouse” was the name collectively applied to a series of stories by Brian Aldiss appearing in 1961. When in the following year the stories were melded together into a novel, the name was retained in Britain but in the United States it was sold under the name “The Long Afternoon of Earth.” In 2009, it was reissued by IDW Publishing of San Diego as a trade paperback under the original title.

The story takes place in the far future, when the sun has grown brighter and plant growth has increased “Hothouse” was the name collectively applied to a series of stories by Brian Aldiss appearing in 1961. When in the following year the stories were melded together into a novel, the name was retained in Britain but in the United States it was sold under the name “The Long Afternoon of Earth.” In 2009, it was reissued by IDW Publishing of San Diego as a trade paperback under the original title.

The story takes place in the far future, when the sun has grown brighter and plant growth has increased and diversified prolifically, driving almost all animals to extinction and leaving man only a vestige of his former glory, in stature, intelligence, and life expectancy. The plot begins with the departure from its home base of a tribe of humans and its split into different parties. The rest of the story concerns their travels, mostly accidental and involuntary, to various corners of the hothouse earth and beyond.

“Hothouse” won the Hugo award for 1961 in the short-fiction category. As a novel, it has made some s-f “must read” lists, including Pringle’s 100. I can see some reason for this. The proliferation of Aldiss’s vegetable world is exceeded only by the author’s imagination in inventing an astonishing array of beastly plants, many of which have evolved dastardly ways of consuming the others (and our hapless human heroes as well). The story is allowed to move along with a minimum of scientific explication. That is just as well, not only for the conventional reasons of narrative economy, but also because for some of what Aldiss proposes, there can be no explication. Aldiss has been taken to task for ignoring the science that was known at the time of the book’s writing. Critics have mentioned Aldiss’s impossible orbital physics and modes of space travel, as well as the perils of monoculture. I would add to that the implausibility of preserving memories across generations when no one ever talks about them. Nonetheless, by s-f story-telling standards, this book holds its own against others of the period, and should make it to the reading lists of those whose tastes in fiction run towards the imaginative or fantastic.

It has been argued that Aldiss’s disuse of science is an indication that his concerns are directed towards other matters (read weightier ones, perhaps). It has been proposed that Aldiss is one of those writers who occupy a middle ground between science-fiction and what is often called literary fiction. Perhaps so, but there is not a lot of evidence of that in “Hothouse.” If you are an s-f fan who wants to entice your lit fic friends into greater appreciation for s-f, don’t give them this book. It fails to make that muster on several grounds. First, in “fixing up” this book from a series of stories to a novel, insufficient attention has been paid to deleting repeated “intro” material and to seeing that the merged plot flow fully makes sense. For example, one of the three parties we are following simply disappears part way into the book. Second, the prose herein is not bad for s-f but falls short of lit fic standards. Third, our adventurers just tumble along with little point to their adventure. It’s tough to find a meaningful perspective amongst the flora, whether it be on the part of the author, who seems occasionally to forget what his characters are supposed to know, or of the protagonist, whose only development occurs courtesy of a marauding fungus.

Cavils notwithstanding, my thanks to IDW for bringing out this novel again in trade paperback edition. The company has produced a volume with fonts, page layouts, and binding that make for easy reading. Given the effort and result, it is unfortunate that the reissue has been done without a complete check for typos and grammos, of which there are scores. These will strike different readers as more or less annoying, but no reader will like the occasional mistakes in paragraphing of conversations, which require some imagination to attribute which lines go with which speaker.

(Neither this book nor what I say about it should deter anyone from reading Aldiss’s better novel, “Nonstop,” from a few years earlier.)
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Oct 22, 2012 sologdin rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: blew-it-up-you-maniacs, burns-like-cold-iron

Nutshell: tidally locked earth has been taken over by mobile carnivorous plants, and humans are devolved to stupid arboreals, one-fifth our size. Moon is also tidally locked with earth, so giant vegetable spider-things go between earth and moon. They are more menacing in theory than practice, and generally serve as trains for the less dumb protagonists--though, for the most part, the narrative here affirms the proposition that it's better to be lucky rather than smart.

So, yeah, it's all exceedin Nutshell: tidally locked earth has been taken over by mobile carnivorous plants, and humans are devolved to stupid arboreals, one-fifth our size. Moon is also tidally locked with earth, so giant vegetable spider-things go between earth and moon. They are more menacing in theory than practice, and generally serve as trains for the less dumb protagonists--though, for the most part, the narrative here affirms the proposition that it's better to be lucky rather than smart.

So, yeah, it's all exceedingly unlikely. But: that's the point of the post-apocalyptic genre. As I noted in my review of Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, the post-apocalytpic subgenre erases setting and has story limited to individual v. environment. So, basically, the genre sucks all around. This text is likely the archetypical statement of the generic principle: the entire world crawls with omnivorous plants, and characters die every other page or so.

It's got some nifty bits, including intelligent fungus and intelligent fish-things, and the interactions with those species are the most engaging parts of the novel (or collection of novellettes, to be proper).

Some rhetorical defaults, though: narration proceeds referring to "today" or "day" or "night," which are concepts that should be unavailable on a tidally locked planet.

Think of it this way: on a science fiction scale that runs from Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke future history of spacefaring, through the far future weirdnesses of Wolfe (and now Lawrence), to the terminus represented by the horrifying bit in Wells' "The Time Machine" about the end of the world, this one is somewhere bewtween Wolfe and Wells, heading toward Wells by the end, when the smarter plants begin the process of evacuation insofar as "Green rose up into the sky and the shaft pointing finger stretched into the canopy of space and the tip of it was lost to view" (181).

Some cool ideas here and there, but mostly a mess of plant-things eating the fuck out of the protagonists, who are mostly minor children.

Sought this one out, after some productive books-in-print research, specifically because one of my own projects has a similar astronomy. I am pleased to see that my drafts replicate neither the story nor the setting, such as they exist here. If any'all know of other tidally locked planet settings, I am now actively soliciting that knowledge, evaluations immaterial.

Not sure about the Hugo award (for short fiction), and can't really opine, as my edition is the US abridgement of the UK text that actually won.

Recommended for extraordinary ancestral compost heaps of the unconscious mind, those who fail to distinguish between past and present and future, and ones who head to deep space, expanding all the time as pressure drops. ...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Leo Walsh rated it liked it

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss is an odd book. An unnamed disaster has destroyed human civilization, leaving in its place pygmy humans who live like animals in a dangerous, very violent jungle populated almost exclusively by vegetable matter. And the jungle has taken over at least half of the world because the earth now, like the moon, has one side continually facing the sun, which gets hot.

This is not, however, our ancestor's jungle. Instead of peaceful, these jungle plants have teeth. Literally. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss is an odd book. An unnamed disaster has destroyed human civilization, leaving in its place pygmy humans who live like animals in a dangerous, very violent jungle populated almost exclusively by vegetable matter. And the jungle has taken over at least half of the world because the earth now, like the moon, has one side continually facing the sun, which gets hot.

This is not, however, our ancestor's jungle. Instead of peaceful, these jungle plants have teeth. Literally. In Aldiss' world, aggressive plants, nightmare descendants of the Venus fly trap, are the main predators.

The story revolves around the travels of Grem, a man-child, through this "Dying Earth" style world. He meets giant termites -- indeed, the termites are the size of the pygmy humans -- who engineer large castles. And sentient fungi, the Morel, who have the ability to control the minds of the beings it attaches to. And huge, mile-long spider-like plants, called the "traversers," who travel their webs between earth and the moon. The oddest creature he meets, though, is the wise Sodal Ye, a dolphin who is born on the back of three humans.

Overall, this book feels more like Fantasy than Science Fiction. That often works for me when, like Lord of Light , the science is plausible, and the story arises from the conditions naturally. Unfortunately, the science in Hothouse seems forced. And the explanations tenuous. For instance, Aldiss postulates a moon that hangs in one fixed location above the earth. Which, given the laws of gravity, would never work. The moon, without its orbit around the earth, would crash to the earth. The reason is simple: the moons orbit is a balance between the moon's trying to catapult past the earth and its attraction to earth's gravitational field.

There are other scientific implausibilities. Like the traversers climbing their webs to the moon. And adopting the same body plan as current spiders. And what of the termites at over a foot high. To attain that height, their internal structures would need to change drastically as the increased volume of their innards would soon cause the build-up of toxins (since their surface area would increase as a square of the increased size, versus the cube for the volume). And their chitin exoskeletons would soon become to weak or too heavy to support them due to the area/ volume relationship.

That said, it is a decent tale. I really wanted to give it 3.5 stars. But it really was not good enough for me to give it 4 stars.

Leo Walsh is a writer. His first novel, a work of science fiction titled "even snow melts" will be available on Amazon in March or April 2013 For more thoughts from Leo, check out his blog at leo-walsh.com. ...more

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