Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

First published in 1962; published digitally by Open Road Media on May 19, 2015

Like Alan Dean Foster's novel Midworld (1975), Hothouse imagines a forested world in which humans inhabit a middle level, somewhere between the sky and the ground. Unlike Midworld, Brian Aldiss' world is the Earth of the far future. Hothouse is a global warming novel, but the warming (and increased radiation) resulted from the Earth having locked in rotation with a dying sun rather than the destruction of the ozone layer.

The far-future Earth is richly imagined. One side of the planet is always in sunlight, which explains why it is dominated by vegetation. Humans are among the last surviving animals. Human social structure collapsed as humans died from radiation sickness. Radiation-tolerant humans evolved over time (they are much smaller than the humans of our time), as did insects, aquatic animals, and reptiles, all adapting to the Earth's new environmental conditions. The difference between animal and vegetable has in many cases become obscure. Vegetative life mimics animal life, squids walk on land, and mushrooms are the most intelligent species. The strength of this novel is its background: the environment that Brian Aldiss creates and the variety of lifeforms that have adapted to the climactic changes.

The story is less interesting than the background. It begins with a group of humans, exploring the rituals that define their lives and help them to survive. In its early stages, Hothouse is much like Midworld. The novels depart when Aldiss changes his focus from the group of tree-dwelling humans to a young outcast named Gren.

The plot seems a bit random as Gren stumbles from adventure to adventure.  Aldiss doesn't establish Gren's character or personality, other than making him abrasive. I suspect that these problems are explained by the fact that Aldiss originally wrote a series of related stories that he later fixed up into a novel. That would account for the jarring changes in focus and for storylines that appear and then die out.

Some aspects of the story, particularly off-planet travel, are not well explained and are therefore difficult to accept. I like Hothouse more for its concept of far-future evolution (or devolution) than for the story it tells, but the novel's background is so detailed and imaginative that it makes the story worth reading.

RECOMMENDED