Hothouse - Brian Aldiss [3]
The world of Hothouse is our own planet, inconceivable gulfs of time from now. The Earth no longer spins. The moon is frozen in orbit, bound to the Earth by web-like strands. The day-side of the Earth is covered by the many trunks of a single banyan tree in which many vegetable creatures live, and some insects, and Humankind. People have shrunk to monkey-size. They are few in number, as are the other remaining species from the animal kingdom (we will meet a few species, and we will converse with one mammal, Sodal Ye). But animals are irrelevant: the long afternoon of the Earth, as nightfall approaches, is the time of vegetable life, which occupies the niches that animals and birds occupy today, while also filling new niches – of which the traversers, the mile-long space-spanning vegetable spider-creatures are, perhaps, the most remarkable.
The teeming life forms – which, with their Lewis Carroll-like portmanteau names, feel as if they were named by clever children – fill the sunside of the world. Gren, the nearest thing to a protagonist that Aldiss gives us, one letter away from the omnnipresent green, begins as a child, and more animal than human. A smart animal, true, but still an animal – and he ages fast, as an animal might age. His odyssey is a process of becoming human. He learns that there are things he does not know. Most of his suppositions are wrong, and in his world a mistake will probably kill you. Randomly, intelligently, fortunately, he survives and he learns, encountering a phantasmagoria of strange creatures on the way, including the lotus-eating tummy-bellies, a comic-relief turn that gets increasingly dark as the book progresses. At the heart of the book is Gren’s encounter with the morel, the intelligent fungus who is at the same time both the snake in the Garden of Eden and the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a creature of pure intellect in the same way that Gren and the humans are creatures of instinct.
Sodel Ye – the descendant of dolphins that Gren will encounter towards the end – and the morel, are both intelligent; both know more about the world than the humans, and both are reliant on other creatures to move around and encounter the world, as parasites or symbiotes.
Looking back, one can see why Hothouse was unique, and why, almost fifty years ago, it won the Hugo and cemented Aldiss’s reputation. Compare Hothouse with its most traditionally English equivalent, John Wyndham’s disaster novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), a ‘cosy catastophe’ (to use Aldiss-the-critic’s phrase) in which blinded humans are victimised by huge, ambulatory, deadly plants, band together and learn how to keep themselves safe before, we assume, re-establishing humanity’s dominion over the Earth. In the world of Hothouse there is nothing that makes us superior to plants, and the triffids would be unremarkable here, outclassed and outweirded by the doggerel monsters of the hothouse Earth, the crocksocks, bellyelms, killerwillows, wiltmilts and the rest.
Still, Hothouse remains British science fiction – its imperatives are very different to the American SF of the same period. In American SF from the early Sixties, Gren would have gone on to explore the universe, to restore wisdom to the humans, to restore animal life on earth, all endings that Aldiss is able to dangle before us before he rejects them, for Hothouse is not a book about the triumph of humanity, but about the nature of life, life on an enormous scale and life on a cellular level. The form of the life is unimportant: soon the Sun will engulf the Earth, but the life that came to Earth, and stayed for a moment, will move on across the universe, finding new purchase in forms unimaginable.
Hothouse is a strange book, alienating and deeply, troublingly odd. Things will grow and die and rot and new things will grow, and survival depends upon this. All else is vanity, Brian Aldiss tells us, with Ecclesiastes,