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A review by mendelbot
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
5.0
Let me start out by saying that this book is not for everyone. It's not hard sci-fi per se, but it is a deeply thought out piece of speculitive fiction. The stuff that makes sci-fi hard for some - the weirdness, the modes of life that don't mirror our own, the strange language and dialogue - are evident on almost every page of this book.
And what a strange wonderful novel. It's set in a super far future where the sun is pre-nova and the Earth has stopped spinning, where one half of the planet is in perpetual dark and one half is the title hothouse, with a giant, continent-spanning banyan tree at its center. Vegetable and animal have morphed. Humans have seemingly devolved.
It's not a perfect book by any means: like in a lot of sci-fi, the prose is clunky at times, and the naming of characters does not seem to follow any straight forward logic. But these are minor quibbles. One of the best things about books like this is that they make you wonder at our future as a species on this planet. This is a book about our future, our world, be it one set who knows how far in the future. Within it is a sense of awe and wonder and fear and dread.
And what a strange wonderful novel. It's set in a super far future where the sun is pre-nova and the Earth has stopped spinning, where one half of the planet is in perpetual dark and one half is the title hothouse, with a giant, continent-spanning banyan tree at its center. Vegetable and animal have morphed. Humans have seemingly devolved.
It's not a perfect book by any means: like in a lot of sci-fi, the prose is clunky at times, and the naming of characters does not seem to follow any straight forward logic. But these are minor quibbles. One of the best things about books like this is that they make you wonder at our future as a species on this planet. This is a book about our future, our world, be it one set who knows how far in the future. Within it is a sense of awe and wonder and fear and dread.