Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [1]
As a young man in the army Aldiss found himself serving in Burma and Sumatra, encountering a jungle world unimaginable in grey England, and it is not too presumptuous to suggest that the inspiration for the world of Hothouse began with that exposure to the alien, in a novel that celebrates the joy of strange and savage vegetable growth.
He was demobbed in 1948, returned to England and worked in a bookshop while writing. His first book was The Brightfount Diaries, a series of sketches about bookselling, and shortly thereafter he sold his first set of science-fiction stories in book form – Space, Time and Nathaniel – began editing, became a critic and describer of SF as a medium.
Aldiss was part of the second generation of English science-fiction writers; he had grown up reading American science-fiction magazines, and he understood and spoke the language of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction, combining it with a very English literary point of view. He owed as much to early Robert Heinlein as to H. G. Wells. Still, he was a writer, and not, for example, an engineer. The story was always more important to Aldiss than the science. (American writer and critic James Blish famously criticised Hothouse for its scientific implausibility; but Hothouse delights in its implausibilities and its impossibilities – the oneiric image of the web-connected moon is a prime example – implausibilities are its strengths, not weaknesses.)
Hothouse, Aldiss’s next major work, like many novels of its time, was written and published serially (in magazine form), in America. It was written as a linked sequence of five novelettes, which were collectively given the Hugo Award (the science-fiction field’s Oscar) in 1962, for Best Short Fiction. (Robert A Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land took the Hugo for Best Novel.)
There had been prominent English science-fiction writers before Aldiss, writing for the American market – Arthur C. Clarke, for example, or Eric Frank Russell – but Aldiss came on the scene after the so-called Golden Age was over and began to write at a point where science fiction was beginning to introspect. Authors like Aldiss and his contemporaries such as J. G. Ballard and John Brunner were part of the sea-change that would produce, in the second half of the Sixties, coagulating around the Michael Moorcock-edited New Worlds, what would become known as the ‘New Wave’: science fiction that relied on the softer sciences, on style, on experimentation. And although Hothouse predates the New Wave, it can also be seen as one of the seminal works that created it, or that showed that the change had come.
Aldiss continued to experiment in form and content, experimenting with prose comedic, psychedelic and literary. His ‘Horatio Stubbs Saga’, published between 1971 and 1978, a sequence of three books which dealt with the youth, education and war experiences in Burma of a young man whose experiences parallel Aldiss’s, were bestsellers, a first for Aldiss. In the early 1980s he returned to classical science fiction with the magisterial Helliconia sequence, which imagined a planet with immensely long seasons orbiting two suns, and examined the life forms and biological cycles of the planet, and the effect on the planet’s human observers, in an astonishing exercise in world-building.
Restlessly creative, relentlessly fecund, Brian Aldiss has created continually, and just as his hothouse Earth brings forth life of all shapes and kinds, unpredictable, delightful and dangerous, so has Aldiss. His characters and his worlds, whether in his mainstream fiction, his science fiction, or in the books that are harder to classify, such as the experimental, surreal Report on Probability A, are always engaged in, to use graphic novelist Eddie Campbell’s phrase, the dance of Lifey Death.
Hothouse was Aldiss’s second substantial SF novel.