Title:
Hothouse / Author: Brian W. Aldiss / Publisher: Open Road Integrated
Media / Release Date: Out Now / Rating: 5/5
Brian
Aldiss has written many fine novels over his long career, but even by
his high standards Hothouse is something special. This Hugo
Award-winning tale describes a future world in which the earth has
stalled on its axis, with the side exposed to the sun becoming a riot
of deadly flora. Man – “the last animal species in all the
all-conquering vegetable world” – has shrunk in size and
intelligence and dropped to the bottom of the food chain.
The book's protagonist, Gren, is a member of a dwindling tribe who live in the branches of a dense tropical jungle that consists of one vast banyan tree: “It had become the king of the forest, then the forest itself.” Very quickly, however, the tribe breaks up and Gren and a few other youngsters are forced to fend for themselves and go on a voyage of discovery into this terminal world.
The
tale Aldiss tells is a both a thrilling, breakneck adventure and an
extraordinary imaginative feat. Almost every chapter introduces some
mind-boggling new phenomenon – plants that create fire by focusing
sunlight, an intelligent fungus that can strike up a symbiotic
relationship with its victims – culminating in the introduction of
the traversers, huge, spider-like plants that bask in the solar rays
outside the earth's atmosphere and that have entangled the moon in
their vast webs.
Aldiss describes all this in haunting, hallucinatory prose that's all the more powerful for being clipped and controlled – it's like Edgar Rice Burroughs rewritten by William Golding. The scenes involving the moon, in particular, are some of the most inspired in all of British science fiction. Later on, the pace slackens somewhat and tone of the novel becomes more discursive, while the ending feels slightly rushed, but this scarcely detracts from what is a remarkable tour de force and a genuine SF classic.
