Hothouse (published in the US as The Long Afternoon of Earth) was published by Faber and Faber in 1962, assembled from five novelettes that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1961 and won the Hugo Award for Short Fiction. The setting is the distant future: the Earth has become tidally locked, one face permanently turned toward a bloated, dying sun. On the daylight side, temperatures are enormous and plant life has evolved to fill every ecological niche that animals once occupied. Traversers — mile-wide vegetable spiders — spin webs between Earth and the Moon. Killer plants hunt in packs. Sentient fungi parasitize the few remaining humans, who are tiny, green-skinned descendants of Homo sapiens, living in the canopy of a banyan tree that covers an entire continent.
Gren, a child driven from his group, falls to the forest floor and is infected by a morel — a sentient fungus that attaches itself to his head and communicates directly with his brain. The morel is intelligent, manipulative, and occasionally wise, and its relationship with Gren drives the rest of the narrative as they travel across the transformed Earth.
Aldiss’s imagination in Hothouse is extravagant — every chapter introduces new forms of life, new dangers, new wonders — but the extravagance is grounded in ecological logic. The plants have evolved to fill the niches vacated by extinct animals: some fly, some hunt, some communicate, some wage war. The vision is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, and it represents one of science fiction’s most sustained acts of world-building.
Collecting Hothouse
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1962): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good/very good: $100–$300
- US first (Signet, 1962, as paperback): $20–$50