All the land and coastlines are teeming with half-sentient vegetation that has supplanted most of the animal kingdom, humans and a few breeds of insects being the major exceptions.

A banyan tree has expanded to encompass the entire continent (Eurasia?) where most of the action takes place, only limited by the planet's dark side and its oceans. Earth has ceased to rotate and the moon is in a locked position, the two webbed together by interstellar-travelling spiders.

The sun is completing its lifespan, billions of years from now. Practically all the virtue of 'Hothouse', short of its place in Hugo history, arises from the overwhelming force of its world-building. 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. Aldiss’s most beloved and enduring works. 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.Ī thrilling parable of courage, discovery, and survival, Hothouse is among Grand Master Brian W. 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. 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. 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. 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. A Hugo Award–winning classic about a far-future Earth dominated by gargantuan plants and the few humans who remain

Hothouse by brian w aldiss