|
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
reviewed by John Kenny
Original appearance: FTL 7, Winter 1990
Hothouse was originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction throughout 1961. It won a Hugo for Best Short Fiction in 1962 and was published in book form in Britain the same year. An abridged version entitled The Long Afternoon of Earth was released in the States, and it wasn't until 1976 that the full version was made available there.
The story itself concerns an Earth that has stopped rotating on its own axis and about the Sun. One half is permanently in sunshine, the other in darkness. On the bright half, vegetation has grown out of control. A giant multi-leveled tree dominates everything. Among its branches live the remnants of mankind, short green people of limited intelligence. They and a few species of insects are all that is left of animal life. They are vastly outnumbered by a plethora of mobile vegetation.
The story is a quest which takes its main character Gren, and others to the dark side pressed on by a symbiotic fungus attached to Gren's brain. The book is a tour de force, its main objective to present a provocative picture of a truly alien Earth in the distant future. When it was published, critics like James Blish slammed it for being woefully unscientific. But aldiss wans't trying to be. In fact he had thrown science out of the window totally, in order to apply liberal dollops of artistic license.
The problem lies in its structure. Having been presented as a serial, here in book form the episodic nature of the story limits it. There's a relentlessness about the quest which makes the middle sections boring becuase Aldiss is stopping to describe even more outlandish creatures.
Ultimately, as a novel it doesn't work. Despite the truly alien world he creates in loving detail I wouldn't consider this to be one of Aldiss' best. If you are going to read this, read it for the evocative picture, not the story.
|
