Hothouse

Hothouse is a science fiction novel by Brian W. Aldiss, published in 1962 by Faber & Faber with a cover by Oscar Mellor. Its tone moves between adventure and ecological fable. It is set in a distant future in which the Earth has come to a fixed position relative to the Sun: one hemisphere lives in perpetual light and the other in perpetual gloom. Plant life has spread across the planet with extraordinary vigour, and humanity survives in small communities, reduced to a fraction of its present size.

The book grew out of five novelettes serialised in 1961 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which Aldiss later gathered into a single volume. Its structure is that of a sequence of journeys and misadventures in which the protagonists cross a hostile and shifting world. Among its episodes are the break-up of a tribe led by Lily-yo, a voyage to the Moon, the transformation of the adults into flying beings, and an encounter with a sentient fungus that forms a symbiosis with humans.

The novel received the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction, and its reception has been mixed. James Blish condemned its disregard for the physics of orbits, while other critics praised the force of its imagery. In the United States an abridged version appeared first, as The Long Afternoon of Earth, and the complete text was not published there until 1976. The book has influenced post-apocalyptic imagery in science fiction and role-playing games such as Gamma World.