Along the way, he will encounter many strange perils, gain (and lose) companions, become the host to a parasitic morel mushroom that has evolved sentience, and uncover some of this world’s many secrets. The story follows one of the tribe’s few man-children, Gren, and the epic voyage he undertakes.
Abandoned by the adults, the children of the tribe must make their own fate in the Green. The webs of great spider-like plants called Traversers link the Earth to the moon. A massive banyan tree covers the sun-light face of the Earth, and in its branches a million dramas of life, death, and decay unfold… such as the plight of a small tribe of humans. Leader Lily-yo opts to disband her tribe and travel “Up,” the adults tying themselves to a traverser’s web. For the plant world has evolved and gained sentience-it is the age of the vegetable, and humanity is in its twilight years. Humans now occupy the lowest rank on the totem pole, shriveled and out-classed by the remaining insect life and the numerous forms of flora. Due to high doses of solar radiation, life on Earth has devolved and mutated. Tens of thousands of years into the future, the Earth’s rotation has locked, with one face locked on a dying sun, the other side locked in orbit with a moon now encrusted with plant life. Sphere Science Fiction Classics #1 – 1971 – Eddie Jones.
(Note that I recieved an eARC in exchange for an open and honest review.) Hothouse-variant title The Long Afternoon of Earth-dates back the early years of Aldiss’ career, when it was printed as five linked novelettes in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1961, and earned Aldiss a Hugo Award in the Best Short Story category. He’s now one of the oldest SF writers still active, having published novels as recently as 2013. Aldiss did great work not just penning classics in the genre, but also as an editor and critic, working on a number of excellent anthologies and critical works on the genre (the Hugo-winning Trillion Year Spree). He remained a productive author throughout the 1960s and 1970s, helping influence the direction of science fiction’s New Wave and producing some unconventional works for the magazine New Worlds under editor Michael Moorcock.
Aldiss is one of the most important figures from British science fiction’s early years, though his first novel ( Non-Stop) wasn’t published until 1958.
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