Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [0]
Hothouse
Brian Aldiss has been publishing since the 1950s. In the sixties, he originated the three science-fiction anthologies which combined to form The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973). In one form or another, these volumes were reprinted over thirty-five years. He is known for many non-SF novels, the latest being HARM and Walcot (2007), and stories, as well as science fiction, together with articles and poems. He is also an artist.
Aldiss was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to literature. He lives in Oxford.
Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for the novel American Gods (2001). He has written for film and television and comics, but sooner or later he always returns to books. His next book is called The Graveyard Book. His first Brian Aldiss was The Interpreter, which he found by his grandfather’s bed when he was about ten. Years later he discovered that his grandfather did not read fiction, and puzzles over where that book came from to this day.
HOTHOUSE
____________________________________
Brian Aldiss
with an Introduction by Neil Gaiman
and a new Afterword by Brian Aldiss
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 1961
Published in Penguin Classics 2008
1
Copyright © Brian Aldiss, 1960
Introduction copyright © Neil Gaiman, 2008
Afterword copyright © Brian Aldiss, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-191874-7
Introduction
‘Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade’
‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell
Brian Aldiss is now the pre-eminent English science-fiction writer of his generation. He has been writing for over fifty years with a restless energy and intellect that have taken him from the heart of genre science fiction to mainstream fiction and back again, with explorations of biography, fabulism and absurdism on the way. As an editor and as an anthologist he has done much to influence the kind of science fiction that people were reading through the sixties and seventies, and was responsible for shaping the tastes of readers of science fiction in the UK. He has been a critic, and his examinations of the SF field, Billion Year Spree and its reinvention, Trillion Year Spree, were remarkable descriptions of the genre that Aldiss argued began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and defined as ‘Hubris clobbered by Nemesis’. His career has been enormous: it has redefined British SF, always with a ferocious intelligence, always with poetry and oddness, always with passion; while his work outside the boundaries of science fiction, as a writer of mainstream fiction, has gained respect and attention from the wider world.
Brian Aldiss is, as I write this, a living