Hothouse by Brian Aldiss (1962)

I read this book when I was a teenager, and decades later there was still a trace of its wonder and weirdness in my memory, although I didn’t actually remember any details except for some weird plants, the giant spidery creatures, and the colonization of the protagonist’s mind by a fungus. I’ve just read it again and that tantalizing ghost is now gone; while I thought the first part (up to page 72) was good, the rest of the book, made up of parts two and three, was a big disappointment.

The setting is Earth, billions of years in the future. The planet is tidally locked: its rotation having ground to a halt, it has one side perpetually exposed to the Sun, which is fixed in the sky. On top of that, the aging Sun has become hotter. The result of all this excessive sunlight is a world of supersized, superabundant, supercharged vegetation in which all but a few species of animals have been squeezed out of existence. Dominating all land on the sun-facing side of the planet is a single forest — in fact a single tree, infinitely ramified — in and around which is a teeming chaos of plants, many of them predatory, and many of them having convergently evolved to fill niches once filled by animals. Thus we find diverse vegetal monsters, some with teeth, eyes, wings and mobile limbs, all competing in a ferocious war for domination and survival, preying on each other and also occasionally on the few remaining human beings. These tiny green people have to fight for their lives in a brutally hostile jungle, in which almost everything is “green in tooth and claw,” as Aldiss puts it.

The first part of the story is told in the mythic mode of an ancient saga. It’s done with a light touch and contributes to the sense of wonder generated by the unhurried world-building. We learn about the world as we go along, as we see events unfolding from the point of view of a small group of humans. The group has important cultural traditions, such as a matriarchal social structure in which women do all the work and face all the danger while the precious males, though highly valued, are generally passive; and an elaborate death rite involving carved wooden objects, possessed by each person, representing their souls.

This first part of the book is very good — the world-building is imaginative, fascinating, and woven into the action. There’s a powerful moment when the humans see the sea for the first time: the evocation of the frenzied battle between the coastal vegetation and the seaweeds is terrifying.

However, the rest of the book is cringeworthy. Everything, especially character and imagination, is overtaken by the most tediously linear adventure plot. The first part’s seductive leaps of imagination and careful use of a specific literary mode are dropped, to be replaced by cliché, dated attitudes, and embarrassing attempts at humour. The turning point in the book comes, significantly, somewhere in the vicinity of this line:

“My fruit skin chafes my thighs,” Poyly said, with a womanly gift for irrelevance that eons of time had not quenched.

What makes this so disappointing, aside from its basic repulsiveness, is that it comes shortly after the part of the story that sets up the matriarchal culture, in which the women and girls are the central and most active characters. Thereafter, the females are shallow and interchangeable, and the male character Gren steps up to the role of heroic protagonist. Gren’s initial partner, Poyly, is replaced by Yattamur, who is from another tribe, but nothing distinguishes the two. This is made apparent by the “tummy-belly men,” who refer to Gren by name but to Yattamur merely as “sandwich lady,” a reference to her only role, namely as the receptacle of Gren’s sperm (the act of copulation apparently reminding the tummy-belly men of a sandwich — an odd choice of Aldiss’s that would still be odd even if sandwiches actually existed in the world of the novel).

To be clear, this is not a woke misinterpretation or over-reaction. The sexism is an aspect of the book’s turn away from the imaginatively bizarre that we find in part one: it’s meant to be literally billions of years in the future but it’s being narrated by someone who is stuck in the mid-twentieth century. There are both good and bad ways that a work of literature can be of its time. When it exhibits the bad, we say it’s dated. Hothouse, certainly after the first part, is dated in its conventional 1950s attitudes and prejudices, its cruel, infantile humour, its English tweeness, and its throwaway pulp fiction plot.

As I mentioned, one of the things I originally found fascinating, way back when I was a teenager, was the morel fungus that seizes control of Gren’s will. But as with everything else in the book, it utterly loses its charm in the second and third parts. What begins as a fascinatingly ambiguous presence turns into a simple plot device, part antagonistic and part expository.

I admire the first part of the book for its wildly imaginative world-building, but I cannot recommend the novel as a whole. And the problem is not just that what begins as literary then turns into mere pulp fiction; the fact is that the pulpy part of the novel is not even entertaining, dominated as it is by the irritating and entirely unamusing “tummy-belly men,” and by a main character who never becomes remotely interesting or likeable.

Probably essential for scholars of science fiction, but otherwise best avoided.