Hothouse

Original review here

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?

It was a very long time ago that I first read Hothouse. I remembered a little about the world that the children initially find themselves in. The dumblers and running along the branches of the great banyan. I remembered Lily-yo and Gren, but beyond that I had forgotten much of the adventure.

This book is a science fiction classic and because it is such a good imaginative story set me reading science fiction for years. The story is set millions of years in the future when the rotation of the moon has slowed the earth to almost a standstill. The earth now has one face to the sun and one face from it (the dark side), just as the moon does with the earth. Vegetation has taken over, although a few insects and animals still exist - man included, the humans then are not like the humans now they have evolved to live in the new environment, and de-evolved in some senses too. Gren is an intelligent child and this attribute causes problems, and that is what makes the adventure so fascinating. Gren leaves the forest through various (mainly poor) decisions, but it is nor entirely his fault. This plot line give the opportunity to bring in new species of plant and animal. There are new dangers to overcome and new opportunities to be exploited. Eventually, through some tragedies (which are not greatly dwelt on) and through some comic scenes he makes it back to the forest.

Only one thing in the book did not work for me. They find what would not be described as a talking drone. Quite how that is supposed to have survived, power supply in tact, for thousands of millennia is not explained and for me the scene ruined the timeline that had been so carefully constructed and explained. It is only a small criticism of what is rightly a masterpiece.

The plot is a simple adventure story but the world it is set in is amazing.