Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

[james_davis_nicoll]

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Link is broken. It gives me this message "Could not find your craft/ folder. Please ensure that $craftPath is set correctly in /home/jamesdavisnicoll/public_html/index.php"

[james_davis_nicoll]

I am just about to go on shift. I know the big move for my site is today. My guess is it is currently in progress. Will check when my break comes.

[(Anonymous)]

Works now. Thanks.

[kerkevik_2014]

BBC Radio made a radio production a couple of years back, with the late Gareth Thomas from Blake's 7 doing the reading.

[ross_smith]

This was one of the first SF novels I ever read, back in early high school (I would have been about 12 or 13, I think). I've read it many times over the years, and although I'm well aware of its faults (starting with sexism and passing through "about as much scientific accuracy as could be inserted into the eye of a needle without making it any more difficult to thread"), it remains one of my favourite comfort reads.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't read Hothouse for many years, so I may be leaping in the wrong direction, but the suggestion of an influence of Stableford leads me to speculate on a connection with F. Paul Wilson's Healer.

nitpick, in the best rassef tradition

[redbird]

According to the link, while Le Guin citicized Aldiss in that letter, the actual anthology she was refusing to blurb was edited by George Zebrowski.

Re: nitpick, in the best rassef tradition

[narmitaj]

I wonder if Le Guin was at odds with Aldiss in particular over sexism; maybe, but after all his position is that sf was basically kicked off in the first place by Mary Shelley. Possibly it was more what he said specifically about Le Guin and her work, perhaps elsewhere but certainly in the year before that letter in Trillion Year Spree (1986), which according to this comment was a bit dismissive: "Aldiss devotes a number of pages to Le Guin and her influence on the genre, holding her critically at arm’s length, which is interesting to see: few authors have really had this treatment in this particular book. He acknowledges her stance in the genre, but chastise her for being preachy." (In the same book Aldiss also apparently: "knows Asimov’s limitations and lists them without prejudice. He does the same for other authors, too, which has enraged some Heinlein fans.")

Against that, Aldiss also apparently said (though not sure where, quoted in a Kirkus article in 2014 by Andrew Liptak): "The Dispossessed forms a high water mark of modern science fiction, illuminating its medium. It is a novel of subtlety and power, and quintessentially science fiction: the story of the creation of an impossible device."

In any case, Le Guin says that even if it was a Brian Aldiss critical work sneering at her, she could imagine blurbing it anyway. But this anthology isn't that book, as Redbird points out, though Aldiss is one of the authors anthologized by Zebrowski.

[leecetheartist]

Did it start out as a short story? I remember a story like the one described, but it was in an anthology. I don't think I read a whole novel...

[dormouse1953]

Indeed, Hothouse the novel is a fix-up. The individual stories appeared in F&SF. I remember reading the first story in the sequence in the anthology Out of This World 4, possibly the first SF anthology I ever read. It was in my school library.

[leecetheartist]

Right, okay, cool. I think I read the same anthology! Thank you! There were more? Interesting.