Hello Folks,
An average turnout at our most recent meeting. We all enjoyed our book,
Mission: Tomorrow, moderately or better. For our next book, we’ve chosen a
classic adventure story on a far future Earth in Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss.
The next Science Fiction club meeting will be on Thursday, February 9, 2017.
Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 2:00 UTC.
Place: Book Nook at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e
Our book, Hothouse, is available in Publisher Quality from Bookshare at:
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/1047739
Here is Bookshare’s Long Synopsis:
A Hugo Award-winning classic about a far-future Earth dominated by gargantuan
plants
and the few humans who remain Millions of years beyond our time, our Earth has
long
since stopped spinning--and giant flora have taken over the sunlit half of the
motionless
world. Here humans are among the very few animal species that still exist,
struggling
to survive against enormous odds, but they have become small and weak, and their
numbers have dwindled to almost nothing. When the aging leader of Gren's tribe
decrees
it is time for the old ones to go "Up," the younger are left to make their own
way
below. Although the journey will not be an easy one for young Gren, he sets off
on
an odyssey across a perilous world populated by carnivorous plants and other
evolved
vegetation. But any knowledge to be gained at the terminator--the forbidding
boundary
between the day world and the night--might well prove worthless for the boy and
the
companions he amasses along the way when the expanding sun goes nova and their
Earth
is no more. A thrilling parable of courage, discovery, and survival, Hothouse
is
among Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss's most beloved and enduring works.
Ingeniously
inventive, richly detailed, and breathtakingly lush and vibrant, the doomed
world
and people that Aldiss creates will live forever in the minds of all those who
enter
this remarkable realm.
Here is a slightly edited review from SF Site:
https://www.sfsite.com/06a/hh105.htm
[Hothouse] is credited on the cover with
having received the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel, which is not true. Rather,
five
stories which make up
the book were published separately in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction in 1961,
and they were collectively awarded the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction.
However, taken together they
read as a well-unified novel, a better "fixup" than many other SF novels based
on
series of short stories. And taken together, they are of Hugo Award quality,
in my opinion. (And
as I had not previously read the whole book, only one of the short stories in
some anthology or other, I
can happily eliminate another lacuna in my Hugo Award reading.) (Incidentally,
the U.S. edition of this book was
previously called The Long Afternoon of Earth, and it was slightly cut.)
Hothouse is set in the far future of Earth. The Sun has expanded, and is
nearly ready to
go nova. The
Earth and the Moon are now both in tide-locked orbits, so that each keeps one
face
continually toward the
Sun. The bulk of Earth's sunward face is dominated by a huge jungle, mostly
composed
of a single banyan
tree, which has been colonized by any number of weirdly evolved plants.
Very few animal species remain, and the plant species have adapted to fill many
animal
niches. For example,
the Traversers are huge spider-like plants, which have built webs between the
Earth
and the Moon.
(The book is not an example of hard science fiction, to say the least -- one of
the
absurdities is that the
according to Aldiss' conception, the Earth and the Moon are at corners of an
equilateral
triangle with the
Sun, which is necessary for them both to be tide-locked -- but which also means
that
the webs of the
Traversers span some 93,000,000 miles -- 250,000 miles, I had thought, was wacky
enough! I should add,
however, that scientific verisimilitude is in no way a goal of this book, and as
long as the reader
doesn't try to find scientific rationality behind Aldiss' ideas, he will be
enchanted
by the imaginative
vigor behind them.) Aldiss' descriptions of the various plant species, the
remaining
animal species,
and of the ecology of this future Earth are tremendously interesting, clever,
and
colourful: his imagination
is fully as fecund as his future "hothouse" world.
One of the few animal species which has survived is humans, in several
much-altered
forms. The novel
follows Gren, a young male member of a tribe living in the jungle. The opening
segment
tells of a crisis
in the tribe's existence: its leader decides that she and the other adults are
too
old, and must "go up,"
leaving the tribe to the just-maturing children. We follow the adults on their
curious
journey "up," which
seems at first simply a euphemism for death, but which turns out to mean
something
quite different. Then
the book abandons them to follow the children, particularly Gren, who rebels
against
the new leader, and
takes one of the girls with him on an unexpected journey. Gren finds himself
"colonized"
by an intelligent
fungus, who has plans to use humans to control the world. The fungus leads Gren
and an ever-growing
and contracting band of allies on a journey to "Nomansland," the border between
land
and ocean, then
across the ocean to a strange island and finally to the dark side. Aldiss both
follows
SFnal tradition
by having this journey be a journey of discovery about the true nature of this
world,
and subverts
tradition by his description of Gren's character, his reluctance to learn, and
his
ultimate desires once
he has learned the truth about Earth's future.
The greatest strength of this book I have already mentioned: the constantly
delightful
inventions of new
plants and animals and life-cycles. None of these are terribly plausible, but
they
are consistently
fun and clever. Gren is not the most admirable of characters, but somehow he
and
his companions become
likable. The book is also quite funny in many places, sometimes ribaldly,
sometimes
satirically. The
non-human intelligences, such as the fungus and another being who shows up late
in
the book, are also
delightfully off-centre. The plot is resolved very well, and we are left with a
nicely complete description
of the strange "Hothouse" Earth, as well as intriguing hints about the rest of
the
universe and the
future. A very fine book, and a worthy award-winner.
Come join us next month to talk about what sounds like a marvelously
imaginative story, and anything else SF literature related.
Evan
