Also known as The Long Afternoon of Earth

  Hothouse is an astounding work of fiction. With Hothouse, Aldiss won the Hugo award – the most prestigious award in science fiction—but it deserves to be recognized beyond the science fiction community as a literary masterpiece.

 The first chapter of Hothouse is so full of neologisms, images, events, and new terms that it is overwhelming. The story is set billions of years into the future. The sun is going nova, and as it expands, the earth is heating up, causing a kind of greenhouse effect. Plants thrive in this environment, and have taken over. Plants have evolved into all kinds of new species that are predatory and dangerous.

Humans, by contrast, have lost their place at the top of nature’s ladder, and have evolved into little green creatures. Green, so that they can camouflage themselves against plants that might want to eat them.

Hothouse tells the story of Gren, a young man who has an accident and gets an intelligent parasite living in his skull. The parasite, called the Morel can communicate with him by sending messages directly to his brain. The Morel sends Gren and his mate Yattmur on an odyssey around the world, in an effort to restore mankind’s lost greatness.

Hothouse employs many concepts from biology, as well as many complex physics ideas, although some of them are implausible.

See my pages on the physics and biology of Hothouse for more detailed look at the ideas in this book.