Hot House by Brian Aldiss

Known in America as The Long Afternoon of Earth, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss was written originally as five (rather long) short stories and appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction — probably my favourite sf magazine, by the way. 

This sequence of tales deservedly won Aldiss a Hugo award in 1962 and soon appeared as a book, more or less stitched together to form a continuous novel. I read it when I was a kid but I was prompted to pick it up again by a wonderful BBC radio adaptation, details archived here skilfully filleted by the writer Lu Kemp.

The thing that came across so forcefully in the radio version — and was no doubt responsible for the book winning its Hugo back in the 1960s — was the sheer richness of Aldiss's imagination and the strangeness of his vision.

In the far future the Earth is in a locked orbit, half the planet in freezing darkness, the other half permanently turned towards the sun, receiving the endless light and heat which accounts for both the American and British titles of this book.

In this hothouse world, vegetation dominates and indeed half the planet is pretty much occupied by one giant, interconnected banyan tree. In its branches are the remaining life forms, included the shrunken (and green-skinned!) descendants of humanity.

Animal life is scarce, though, and plants rule the world. And what plants. They are mobile, semi-intelligent (or at least sentient) and come in a breathtaking assortment of bizarre and dangerous forms. Particularly impressive are the zeppelin-sized traversers, sort of giant spiders who spin webs from the Earth to the (equally gravity locked ) Moon, as they move over the sky "like clouds".

Aldiss really excells in dreaming up lifeforms such as this. The bellyelm is a particularly brilliant creation; it's a two-part entity with its lure-and-decoy companion. And Aldiss also shows real flair in the naming of the flora and fauna of this weird new world. These names call to mind both James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. 

His depiction of the struggle to survive in this savage world — "green in tooth and claw"! — is quite unforgettable. The sequence where a downed the suckerbird tries desperately to escape the clutches of murderous seaweed is simply heartbreaking.

Aldiss often writes very well, as when he describes "the terrible silence of the forest" or "rain sizzling in cataracts off a great flat head" or vegetation that "rose as remorselessly as boiling milk" towards the endless light of the sun...

I was almost a third of the way through the book when I realised something terrifically obvious — it has its roots (!) in The Day of the Triffids. This dawned on me as I read how "gigantic nettles shook their bearded heads."

Like John Wyndham's novel of the Triffids, there's no doubt that Aldiss's book is a classic.

There are some problems with it, though. Not least the science. People have taken issue with the physics of the story, and I personally disliked Aldiss's story device of the devolved human beings having, deep in their brains, detailed racial memories of the past. There's some other basic biology which is also just plain wrong,

But this pales beside the real weakness of the book. Its central character Gren is an unpleasant self-centred bully. As I mentioned, Hothouse was written originally as five much shorter stories. In can see how in that format Gren wouldn't have outstayed his welcome with the reader. 

And I suspect Aldiss didn't realise just how intensely unsympathetic his protagonist would seem when these tales were joined back to back to form a novel.

Don't let that put you off, though. There is so much here to be enjoyed. This fascinating world is presented to us through a fast moving  adventure in the manner of the interplanetary novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs (or, later, Michael Moorcock).

But the most striking influence here is that of William Hope Hodgson. There's a sequence in Hothouse involving an unseen nightmare thing called the Black Mouth which lurks inside a dormant volcano. It emits an eerie siren song that summons all creatures in the vicinity into the volcano and to their doom.

Our heroes only survive because they manage to hold out until that "dreadful melody ceased in mid-note." They watch as "five terrible long fingers came to rest precisely together on the lip of the Black Mouth. Then one by one they were withdrawn, leaving Gren with a vision of some unimaginable monster picking its teeth after an obscene repast."

Our heroes hurry away, looking back over their shoulders "to make sure nothing came climbing out of the volcano after them."

This is strongly reminscent of William Hope Hodgson's visionary horror stories, especially that Carnacki the Ghost-Finder tale 'The Whistling Room'. It also calls to mind Hodgson's novel Nightland, though not as much as the next section does...

As Aldiss's heroes trek into the lands beyond the terminator into the "Nightside Mountains", the whole situation strongly evokes Hodgson's Nightland with its clouds, storms, lightning, and the final glimpses of the livid twisted sun which is slowly going nova.

There's also an extraordinary sequence where Gren glimpses a sort of interdimensional opening into an "impossible green universe of delight" which prefigures Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.

It seems a little wrong to conclude with this list of comparisons, because ultimately Brian Aldiss's Hothouse is a classic because it's unique.


(Image credits: The covers are from Goodreads. The original green Sphere edition is from a French ABE bookseller. The orange and white Faber hardcover is from an American ABE bookseller.)