Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide

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Long aeons in Earth's future, an Age of Plants has risen. Dangerous, carnivorous plants are everywhere - some species are even mobile hunters! The remaining humans are a dwarfed, shrunken species. With greatly reduced intelligence and a simple, tribal lifestyle, they struggle to stay alive long enough to maintain their population.

hothouse, but one day 40C The terrifying truth: Britain’s a hothouse, but one day 40C

As you can see, things look pretty grim for mankind! This book gives us a fascinating look at devolution in action, beside the little green people who are our direct descendants, there are subspecies of man who are presumably descended from crossbreeding of unknown origin.The most interesting example being the tummy-belly men who have a symbiosis relationship with a tree that feeds and control them through a tail which functions like an umbilical cord. When this is cut the tummy-belly men become clumsy, floundering and almost mindless; with a speech pattern which is particularly hilarious (much funnier than Yoda's). Aldiss' plant dominated Earth is full of ambulatory mostly carnivorous plants, John Wyndham's Triffids would have some very stiff competition here. Selbst als philosophische Novelle mit kafkaeskem Charakter gibt das Buch so nicht besonders viel her. Sie strotzt vor erzählerischen, literarischen und Logikfehlern. Wie der Autor damit einen Preis gewinnen konnte ist mir schleierhaft. Kevin Anderson describes “an endemic bias” among those building emission scenarios, and warns that “the modelling community is actually self-censoring its research focus to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm.” Then even those characters just started annoying the hell out of me, but I suppose that was intended.

As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.” Even though I loved the worldbuilding, the characters put me off. The various tribes, reduced to stupid creatures, were quite hard to root for. The tummybellies, which are supposed to be the fun part of the story, are the most annoying and I couldn’t help resonating with Gren, our main character, on this, even if I didn’t approve on his behaviour. By 2070, about 20% of the land surface could be uninhabitable due to extremes of heat, weather, drought and disease. I was heartbroken by what Gren did to the Tummy-Bellies and I suppose that was the highlight of the book for me, because it was the only time when I actually felt something. These changes underline one of the most startling aspects of climate breakdown: the speed with which global average temperature rises translate into extreme weather.

Hothouse Earth - Icon Books Hothouse Earth - Icon Books

The plot itself is mostly an excuse to travel the planet and observe and comment on the strange new world the Earth has become. The main character, Gren, is part of a human tribe that decides to seek a better, safer place to live far from their current home. While plants have grown bigger, stronger, smarter and more aggressive, humans are now only one-fifth of their original size and live on the edge of extinction. The world was fantastic, spanning from spiderwebs that spanned between the earth and the moon, twilight zones where wolfmen roam, trees that shoot fire, and fishmen that rise up from the waters to preach about civilization and the coming nova of our sun. Too cool. Yeah, Hothouse (1962) was definitely written with some chemical assistance. Maybe some LSD-spiked vegetable juice? It may have been written as a set of five short stories in 1961, but it’s a timeless and bizarre story of a million years in the future when the plants have completely taken over the planet, which has stopped rotating, and humans are little green creatures hustling to avoid becoming plant food. to 5.0 stars. This book is all about WORLD-BUILDING and Brian Aldiss has created a TRIPtastically SUPERB vision of a “far future” Earth unlike anything I have ever read. In the distant future, evolution has decided to BOOT the “Animal Kingdon” square in the nether-regions… Only five great families survived among the rampant green life; the tigerflies, the treebees, the plantants and the termights were social insects mighty and invincible. And the fifth family was man, lowly and easily killed, not organized as the insects were, but not extinct, the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world."

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The bottom line is that 1.5°C is dead in the water. As if to underline the point, the latest findings from the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that the global average sea surface temperature hit a record high of 21.1°C on 1 April. Anyhow. Hothouse is set somewhere along that time, the sun is super hot and on it's last leg. The plant kingdom has taken over riotously and humanity has evolved (or should I say devolved) into... Little. Green. Men. My early impression reading this 1960 science fiction novel set on Earth in a far future, when our plant's rotation has stalled and weird, dynamic forms of vegetable life are dominant, leaving the rest - tiny humans, wasps, termites and a few others to battle on as best they can was to feel the similarities with J G Ballard's The Drowned World. Both imagine a future world that in some ways is more similar to the prehistoric past, the (Jungian?) notion of an inherited species memory is important in both, and the importance of the time that both authors spent in the Far East - Ballard as a boy, Aldiss - if I remember correctly - as part of his military service, is not something that you have to lift stones to see.