Who Goes There?

Brian W. Aldiss debuted in the mid-’50s, and within just a few years he emerged as one of the most eye-catching talents in genre SF, on both sides of the Atlantic. Being a British writer he naturally started with the UK magazines, but once he found a home in F&SF stateside it was clear he was a talent not to be fucked with. He would have one of the longest and most acclaimed (at least among fellow writers) careers of any genre SF writer, having started in the ’50s but seamlessly becoming a crucial figure in the New Wave a decade later. He wrote one of the first notable histories of the field, Billion Year Spree, then later massively revised it and co-wrote with David Wingrove to make Trillion Year Spree, the latter winning him (and Wingrove) a Hugo. Of course Aldiss had already won a Hugo, this one for fiction, under circumstances so unusual as to not be repeated. See, people usually count Hothouse as a novel, although it’s really a fix-up of related stories; and the “novel,” as a series of linked stories, won Aldiss the 1962 Hugo for Short Fiction. It remains the only example of a short fiction Hugo going to a group of stories. Admittedly had Hothouse (initially titled The Long Afternoon of Earth in the US) been counted as a novel then Aldiss would’ve stood no chance against the titan that was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I’ve read “Hothouse” before, although I’m rereading it and reviewing it now because I remember basically nothing from that first encounter. I’ve not read the other stories yet, but rest assured I’ll be covering them on this site in due time.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1961 issue of The Magazine and Science Fiction. Obviously you can find “Hothouse” in its novel form, but as a standalone story it’s also been reprinted in Mutants: Eleven Stories of Science Fiction (ed. Robert Silverberg), The Great Science Fiction Series (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Frederik Pohl), The Great SF Stories #23 (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and a Silverberg anthology that’s gone by two titles, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder and Science Fiction: 101. That last one comes with commentary on each story which at the very least may prove interesting to you, if not helpful as a would-be short fiction writer.

Enhancing Image

The epigraph of this story is a couplet from the Andrew Marvell poem titled “To His Coy Mistress,” a borderline erotic love poem in which, seemingly, the narrator’s beloved is conflated with a tree—maybe not just a tree but the tree. All the trees of the world. It’s a proto-environmentalist poem that you’ve very likely seen quoted elsewhere if you’re a seasoned SF reader, since Ursula K. Le Guin quotes the same couplet for her short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.” If I had a nickel for every time this poem has been quoted in 20th century science fiction I would have at least two nickels—which may not sound like a lot, but it’s weird that it happened at least twice! Of course in the case of the Aldiss story the tree of Marvell’s poem is indeed a single tree that has grown so as to become a vast forest by itself. “On this great continent where the humans lived, only one banyan tree grew now. It had become first King of the forest, then it had become the forest itself. It had conquered the deserts and the mountains and the swamps.” The single banyan tree has conquered the “day” half of the world, serving as the base for what has now become mostly varieties of plant life, from fungi to strange bulking plants called “traversers” that can easily be confused for enormous spiders. Earth and the moon have become locked in place in relation to each other, such that one half of the world is literally always day while the other is always without light, and the traversers have even somehow built a network of webs that acts as a path between Earth and the moon. The only non-plant life on land is a few species of insect, which nonetheless have grown truly massive, along with a small pocket of mankind.

You may notice that this premise sounds a bit outlandish even by Looney Tunes standards. The idea of Earth and its moon becoming locked in place, with there even being life on the latter, is patently scientifically implausible, which I suspect is why in Robert P. Mills’s introductory blurb for “Hothouse” he calls it “science fantasy.” It would be a fatal error to read Aldiss’s story as straight SF, as apparently James Blish did; but as I’ll get to in a moment, it’s not totally unfair to blame Blish for his dissatisfaction with “Hothouse”—not for the implausibility of the premise itself, but because Aldiss goes out of his way to try to make it sound plausible. The third-person narration often reads like a script for a nature documentary, albeit a bit more flowery (aha) than the usual. We meet a tribe of humans, comprised of adults and children (in the world of the story you basically stop being considered a child once you’re physically old enough to breed, (which has its own implications…), and it only takes a couple pages for one of the children to get swallowed up by a massive plant akin to a Venus fly trap. “It is the way,” as the elders say. Life both is and is not cheap here; given the smallness of the tribe every life counts, but also there are more children than adults because not all the children are expected to make it to adulthood. Not so much safety in numbers as an insurance policy. There are more children than adults, but there are also more women than men. The adult women make the important decisions while the men are basically walking sperm banks; this could be construed as feminist if not for the fact that the humans are both deeply tied to tradition and have basically no rights to speak of. After all, civilization as we know it does not exist. It’s a tyrannical little tribe, functioning as it does for the “good” of the race, which after all could easily go extinct.

Humans are so likely to be lost entirely to the vegetation or insects that rather than try to bury what can be retrieved the tribe does a burial rite for a fallen member’s “soul,” a doll “roughly carved of wood” that then stood in for the once-living person. After having done this for the child who’d been killed at the beginning of the story, the elders and the children of the tribe decide to part ways—the elders being old enough to “go up” and the children now being old enough to look after themselves. The life expectancy in this future world must be insanely short—like in the days of hunter-gatherer groups. It makes sense, now that the few humans left have become prey far more often than predator, and Aldiss is a mean-enough bastard that he’s not above killing off children or well-meaning characters. Even in this first story characters can die suddenly, so it’s best to not get too attached to anyone. Nevertheless, we do have characters with names, and possibly even personalities—although we don’t have much to go on there. We have a bit of an ensemble for this first story, but the closest we get to a protagonist would be Lily-yo, the matriarch of the tribe and the one who decides that maybe it would be for the best if she and a few fellow elders took a one-way ticket to the moon, along the traversers’ web, a journey which may or may not kill them. Only two males are left out of the children, Gren and Veggy, and as we can infer these humans really need their walking sperm banks. (I’ve read that Gren becomes an important character as the series goes on, but in this first story he’s little more than an accessory, and easy to forget about.) So of the adults going up we have Lily-yo, Haris, Flor, Jury, Daphe, and Hy. I may be forgetting someone, so sorry about that.

We have carnivorous plants, but we also have giant insects with the tigerflies, treebees, plantants, and termights. (Can you guess what the termights are supposed to be.) The insects feed off each other, the humans, and even the traversers. I know this is supposed to be unfathomably far in the future, but I have to wonder what could’ve happened to produce such a fucked up ecosystem as this; not only are basic physics out the window, but so is Darwinian evolution seemingly. And yet, a good chunk of the story’s word count is Aldiss explaining the dynamics of this ecosystem, as if it were not based on an already-implausible premise. Taken purely as science fiction it’s nonsensical, but it also fights against being taken as fantasy—at least fantasy as the genre was understood in 1961. The telling of the story is as if we’re being given a glimpse into the lives of future humans who actually bear little relation to us, and who have become almost like the animals you’d see in a nature documentary. When Lily-yo and company have gotten to the moon they find themselves mutates via solar radiation, and also find that Daphe and Hy did not survive the journey. It is the way. We’re given no insight into the thinking of these characters, such that they become purely kinetic beings, all living and dying on action, and so we’re not that emotionally invested when a few do inevitably kick the bucket. But there’s another side to this, in that Aldiss’s treatment of his characters is so heartless that it reinforces the cutthroat nature of this story’s world. It’s kill or be killed. When the surviving adults reach the moon they find they’ve become mutated, which would normally be a negative—only here it means they might’ve found an advantage over their nenemies. And maybe an ally.

There Be Spoilers Here

The traversers had constructed a passage to the moon, and brought life with them. “More thoroughly than another dominant species had once managed to do, the traversers colonised the moon.” I find it funny to think “Hothouse” takes place in the same universe as the real-world moon landing, although that wouldn’t happen for another eight years, not to mention the physics don’t line up at all. How would humanity have gotten to the moon with this story’s physics? With a really big slingshot? Anyway, the adults of the tribe find traversers, along with other plant life (yes, breathable air), on the moon, but they also find the flymen. It’s not obvious at first, but the flymen are in fact mutated humans, with angel-like wings that make them suited to the moon’s lighter gravity. Growing wings is one mutation made possible by solar radiation; there are mutations that are less useful. There are non-winged humans among the flymen called Captives who nonetheless serve an important function in this moon society, called “the True World.” But there’s still a problem: replenishing the human race. Age has something to do with it, but the likelier culprit for the lack of children on the moon is that the radiation tended to render the incoming humans impotent, “the rays that made their wings grow made their seed die,” so that the only practical solution is to retrieve more humans from Earth. The leader of the flymen, Band Appa Bondi, is one such human who had been spirited away to the moon as a child. Don’t get attached to him.

Also don’t get attached to Jury; she gets killed offscreen. It is the way. The climax of “Hothouse” sees Band Appa Bondi and the remainder of Lily-yo’s gang heading back to Earth to retrieve the children, only to be met with an army of tigerfly larvae—all of whom happen to be hungry, Band Appa Bondi gets killed unceremoniously in the battle and Our Heroes™ don’t even pay it a second thought. It’s hard to overstate how both outlandish and hardboiled this story is; it’s an odd but compelling combination. “Hothouse” very much ends on a sequel hook—not really a cliffhanger but as a sign of things to come. I remember Silverberg, in his Science Fiction: 101 anthology, had to evaluate “Hothouse” quite differently from the other stories included since it’s the only one that wasn’t written as a standalone; like sure, you could read it as a standalone, if you’re a little freak, but what’s the point in that. What’s the point of developing a fictional world as vividly (if outlandishly) as Aldiss does here and relegating that to a one-off story? What is this, Jack Vance? Aldiss is a good deal more cerebral than Vance. I like Aldiss, but I get the impression he knew he was the smartest person in the room nine times out of ten, and I’m subconsciously envious of this as a certified dumbass. I sometimes get the impression Aldiss may be too smart for me. As such “Hothouse” may be the quintessential Aldiss story in that it leaves me evenly split between ambivalent and intrigued—both because I’m keenly aware he’s doing something unique, and he knows it too.

It is the way.

A Step Farther Out

I appreciate “Hothouse” a lot more on a reread, although I’m not sure I can say it’s “my thing.” It’s already a longish novelette, but it’s dense. It’s easy to see how a hardcore SF reader would be frustrated by it, but it’s also easy to see how in 1961 readers would’ve been impressed with it; it’s not quite New Wave, not least because it lacks any kind of psychological insight into its human characters, but it’s very much a stepping stone to the New Wave era. I also feel that despite sometimes being printed on its own that this is palpably the first entry in a series, as the ending shows, such that I feel like I won’t be honest with myself if I don’t cover “Nomansland” in a few months. Indeed “Nomansland” was already in the can when “Hothouse” was published, since Mills mentions having bought it in the introduction. This is not my favorite Aldiss, but it’s very much worth following.

See you next time.