Hothouse Read online

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Hothouse

  Brian Aldiss has been publishing since the 1950s. In the sixties, he originated the three science-fiction anthologies which combined to form The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973). In one form or another, these volumes were reprinted over thirty-five years. He is known for many non-SF novels, the latest being HARM and Walcot (2007), and stories, as well as science fiction, together with articles and poems. He is also an artist.

  Aldiss was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to literature. He lives in Oxford.

  Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for the novel American Gods (2001). He has written for film and television and comics, but sooner or later he always returns to books. His next book is called The Graveyard Book. His first Brian Aldiss was The Interpreter, which he found by his grandfather’s bed when he was about ten. Years later he discovered that his grandfather did not read fiction, and puzzles over where that book came from to this day.

  HOTHOUSE

  ____________________________________

  Brian Aldiss

  with an Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  and a new Afterword by Brian Aldiss

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1961

  Published in Penguin Classics 2008

  1

  Copyright © Brian Aldiss, 1960

  Introduction copyright © Neil Gaiman, 2008

  Afterword copyright © Brian Aldiss, 2008

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-191874-7

  Introduction

  ‘Annihilating all that’s made

  To a green thought in a green shade’

  ‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell

  Brian Aldiss is now the pre-eminent English science-fiction writer of his generation. He has been writing for over fifty years with a restless energy and intellect that have taken him from the heart of genre science fiction to mainstream fiction and back again, with explorations of biography, fabulism and absurdism on the way. As an editor and as an anthologist he has done much to influence the kind of science fiction that people were reading through the sixties and seventies, and was responsible for shaping the tastes of readers of science fiction in the UK. He has been a critic, and his examinations of the SF field, Billion Year Spree and its reinvention, Trillion Year Spree, were remarkable descriptions of the genre that Aldiss argued began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and defined as ‘Hubris clobbered by Nemesis’. His career has been enormous: it has redefined British SF, always with a ferocious intelligence, always with poetry and oddness, always with passion; while his work outside the boundaries of science fiction, as a writer of mainstream fiction, has gained respect and attention from the wider world.

  Brian Aldiss is, as I write this, a living author, still working and still writing, and a living author who has restlessly crossed from genre to genre and broken across genre whenever it suited him; as such he is difficult to put into context, problematic to pigeonhole.

  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. It is an uncompromising book, and it exists simultaneously in several science-fictional traditions (for it is science fiction, even if the image at the heart of the story, of a Moon and Earth that do not spin, bound together by huge spidery webs, is an image from fantasy).

  It is a novel of a far-future Earth, set at the end of this planet’s life, when all our current concerns are forgotten, our cities are long gone and abandoned. (The moments in the ruins of what I take to be Calcutta, as the Beauty chants long-forgotten political slogans from a time in our distant future, are a strange reminder of a world millions of years abandoned and irrelevant.)

  It is an Odyssey in which our male protagonist, Gren, takes a journey across a world, through unimagined dangers and impossible perils (while Lily-yo, our female protagonist, gets to journey up). It is a tale of impossible wonders, part of a genre that, like the Odyssey, predates science fiction, its roots in the travellers’ tales of Sir John Mandeville and before, tall tales of distant places filled with unlikely creatures, of headless men with their faces in their chests and men like dogs and of a strange form of lamb that was actually a vegetable.

  But above and beyond all else, Hothouse is a novel of conceptual breakthrough – as explained by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in their Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The moment of conceptual breakthrough occurs as the protagonist puts his head through the edge of the world to see the cogs and gears and engines turning behind the skies, and the protagonist and the reader begin to understand the previously hidden nature of reality. In Aldiss’s first science-fiction novel, NonStop, the jungle is, as we will learn, inside a starship which has been travelling through space for many human generations – so long that the people on the ship have forgotten that they are on a ship. Hothouse is a novel of a different kind of conceptual breakthrough, for the various protagonists are more concerned with survival than they are with discovery, leaving the moments of ‘Aha!’ for the reader to discover: the life-cycle of the fly-men, the role of fungus in human evolution, the nature of the world – all these things we learn, and they change the nature of the way we see things.

  Hothouse is plotted by place and by event and, over and over, by wonder. It is not a novel of character: the characters exist at arm’s length from us, and Aldiss intentionally and repeatedly alienates us from them – even Gren, the nearest thing we have to a sympathetic protagonist, gains knowledge from the morel and becomes estranged from us, forcing us from his point of view into his (for want of a better word) mate Yattmur’s. We sympathise with the final humans in their jungle, but they are not us.

  There are those who accuse science fiction of favouring ideas over characters; Aldiss has proved himself over and over a writer who understands and creates fine and sympathetic characters, both in his genre and in his mainstream work, and yet I think it would be a fair accusation to make about Hothouse. Someone who made it would, of course, miss the point, much as someone accusing a Beatles song of being three minutes long and repeating itself in the choruses might have missed the point.

  Hothouse is a cavalcade of wonders and a meditation on the cycle of life, in which individual lives are unimportant, in which a nice distinction between animal and vegetable is unimportant, in which the solar system itself is unimportant, and in the end, all that truly matters is life, arriving here from space as fine particles, and now passing back on again into the void.

  It’s the only science-fiction novel I can think of that celebrates the process of composting. Things grow and die and rot and new things grow. Death is frequent and capricious and usually unmourned. Death and rebirth are constant. Life – and Wonder – remain. The sense of wonder is an important part of what makes science fiction work, and it is this sense of wonder that Hothouse delivers so effectively, and at a sustained level that Aldiss would not surpass until his trilogy of novels Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, almost thirty years later.

  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, and even intelligence may be a burden of a kind, something parasitic and ultimately unimportant.

  Neil Gaiman

  April 2008<
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  Particularly for Charles and Timmy Parr

  See dying vegetables life sustain,

  See life dissolving vegetate again;

  All forms that perish other forms supply.

  (By turns we catch the vital breath and die)

  Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,

  They rise, they break, and to that sea return.

  ALEXANDER POPE: Essay on Man

  PART ONE

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  chapter one

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  Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.

  The heat, the light, the humidity – these were constant and had remained constant for… but nobody knew how long. Nobody cared any more for the big question that begins ‘How long…?’ or ‘Why…?’ It was no longer a place for mind. It was a place for growth, for vegetables. It was like a hothouse.

  In the green light, some of the children came out to play. Alert for enemies, they ran along a branch, calling to each other in soft voices. A fast-growing berrywhisk moved upwards to one side, its sticky crimson mass of berries gleaming. Clearly it was intent on seeding and would offer the children no harm. They scuttled past. Beyond the margin of the group strip, some nettlemoss had sprung up during their period of sleep. It stirred as the children approached.

  ‘Kill it,’ Toy said simply. She was the head child of the group. She was ten, had lived through ten fruitings of the fig tree. The others obeyed her, even Gren. Unsheathing the sticks every child carried in imitation of every adult, they scraped at the nettlemoss. They scraped at it and hit it. Excitement grew in them as they beat down the plant, squashing its poisoned tips.