joelchrono reviewed Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
Wonderful worldbuilding and concepts, with some annoying quirks
4 stars
Earth, two million years into the future, stopped rotating, half of it is in light, and the other half, in eternal darkness.
Vegetal life reached the peak of the food chain, humanity has devolved to tribalism and has lost most of its intelligence, spending most of their time surviving in the upper levels of a giant tree forest that covers half of the planet.
This book describes a completely alien world, where the Sun’s radiation has evolved plant life in unimaginable ways. No one is safe, and everything that moves is trying to eat you.
The descriptions, the environments, the prose in this book was mindboggling from start to finish. Many times my mind truly get to work trying to comprehend many of the events and concepts exposed here, but it was never a chore, I just wanted to fully experience what was going on, trying to …
Earth, two million years into the future, stopped rotating, half of it is in light, and the other half, in eternal darkness.
Vegetal life reached the peak of the food chain, humanity has devolved to tribalism and has lost most of its intelligence, spending most of their time surviving in the upper levels of a giant tree forest that covers half of the planet.
This book describes a completely alien world, where the Sun’s radiation has evolved plant life in unimaginable ways. No one is safe, and everything that moves is trying to eat you.
The descriptions, the environments, the prose in this book was mindboggling from start to finish. Many times my mind truly get to work trying to comprehend many of the events and concepts exposed here, but it was never a chore, I just wanted to fully experience what was going on, trying to picture how the creatures and the landscapes would be like in this dystopian future.
At first it kinda felt like there was no plot at all, and the characters were all too simple-minded to be interesting to me. However, this quickly changes as a series of events start to unfold and it just keeps going. This story is a journey of discovery and survival. Characters will die left and right, and the question of how things ended up like that will pop up quite a bit. But such is the way of life.
This is not a super fun story, or high stakes and action packed. However, it is not boring, and the more I learned about the world and how it worked, and the more the characters were faced against, only led me to want to keep turning pages, filled with interesting and inventive ideas, that I would never imagine someone could come up with.
Spaceships and faster than light space travel? sure. Alien life and lasers? sure. But the almost lovecraftian vegetal life and the different wildlife and interactions that can be found here are really, really incredible.
I think this is a novel everyone should read, it tackes a variety of topics, but I don’t know if I could say it was the most thought-provoking thing ever, in fact, I barely highlighted any sentences or ideas that I could reflect on compared to Dune or Childhood’s End, but it for sure provoked my mind to imagine, and the ending left me thinking, what would I have done?
