Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide

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It's also quite offensively sexist. Not in the way of many golden-age SF books, with nubile alien slave girls and sexy sorceresses - I love those! No, it's more of an insidious and constant flow of: every time an incident is portrayed, the female characters are less intelligent, less assertive, more timid, unable to come up with their own ideas, shown as interchangeable as lovers. Hey, they're good at 'giving comfort' though. Even though the future society, we are told, is matriarchal, it's the male characters that have to take charge in every situation and are the main 'do-ers' throughout. It is very clear that Aldiss never even considered that a woman might bother to read his book. Females are established as the tribe leaders which probably made this a dystopian future for 1962 audiences. However, the writing is full of old chauvinisms which would be easier to overlook (because of the age of the story) if it wasn't quite so dominant in the conversations and asides: Despite the endless repetitions of the given theme, the journey is full of adventure, albeit with a very thin scientific support. The descriptions of plant and animal life (mostly insects and fish) in their frenetic adaptation to the environment are exuberant and truly grandiose. The poorly sketched characters are not a shortcoming but a deliberate feature of the story, a way to underline their insignificance in the grand scheme.

Hothouse Earth by Bill McGuire | Waterstones

This accessible and authoritative book is a must-read for anyone who still thinks it could be OK to carry on as we are for a little bit longer, or that climate chaos might not affect them or their kids too badly.' MIKE BERNERS-LEE is a professor at Lancaster University, founder of Small World Consultancy and author of There is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years Was soll ich sagen. Die Kürzung hat dieser Geschichte definitiv gut getan. Da wurde sehr viel Ballast zugunsten der Lesbarkeit gestrichen. As it begins it is a little difficult to read, but that changes. What I mean by this is that it does not give you much in the way of traditional narrative. The characters have limited intelligence, speech, and perceptive abilities. They are primitive and focus only on day-to-day survival. So, the world we see through their perspective is not necessarily the world as it is. And for the first part of the novel, the story is very limiting and told through a very narrow and focused view. All-time heat records have been set all over the world,” Jason Samenow, Independent, UK, 5 July 2018 Heat and drought will be the signature conditions of hothouse Britain, but there will still be rain. In the summer, downpours fed by convective storms will be so heavy that little rain will penetrate the ground, most of it flowing over the surface to feed lethal and destructive flash floods. Autumn and winter will see frequent incursions of powerful, damaging, storms and so-called atmospheric “rivers”, bringing rains that last for days on end, overwhelming catchments and driving river flooding on a biblical scale.As to the reason for the world’s tragically tardy response, McGuire blames a “conspiracy of ignorance, inertia, poor governance, and obfuscation and lies by climate change deniers that has ensured that we have sleepwalked to within less than half a degree of the dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail. Soon, barring some sort of miracle, we will crash through it.” Don't get me wrong. It had several things I could've done without, especially the 'tummy-belly' men, some horrible names as I said earlier, and the writing sometimes had me wondering if it was translated from a different language into English because it often felt disjointed, and I would've really liked to have had more focus on certain creatures other than a few that were in the story too much, but, it was very entertaining and makes me crave a sequel or something similar. Great herder, we see you since you come. We Tummy-tree chaps are seeing your size. So know you will soon love to kill us when you go up from playing the sandwich game along with your lady in the leaves. We clever chaps are no fools, and not fools are clever to make glad for you. All the Tummy-men have no feeding and pray you give us feeding because we have no mummy Tummy-feeding--" The morel – Sapient fungus; forms symbiotic relationships with other lifeforms and enhances their intelligence.

HOTHOUSE EARTH | Kirkus Reviews HOTHOUSE EARTH | Kirkus Reviews

So, I'm giving it a final rating of 4 stars for the fact it got better and better as I got more into it, culminating in a very enjoyable read I couldn't put down, and, call it material reasons if you will, for all the beautiful imagery I got in my head while reading it, along with the gorgeous paintings and artwork associated with this novel. Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire, was published as climate breakdown became impossible to ignore. The book arrived during the summer that the UK experienced its hottest day on record. Europe, the US and the Middle East have roasted in relentless heatwaves. Drought and wildfires reigned supreme, and this is just a taste of the future. The Fox glacier in New Zealand in winter. It has retreated by 900m in a decade. Photograph: Gabor Kovacs/Alamy The worldbuilding is stupendous; the images are so vivid and well drawn, that one cannot but be amazed by it. And in this green world live the degenerate humans, green and small, reduced to primary instincts and trying to survive among all these enormous and great dangers.

There's a childish simplicity to the language that the characters use. Some of it works really well as a cute, rhyming poetry (we meet Tummy-bellies and Leather-feathers and there were many things named like this). But a lot of it was like a roughly spoken kid lingo: I'm really impressed with this 1962 classic. I was fully prepared to assume it would be outdated and skimpy on the characters, but what I actually got was a thought-provoking tale that was so heavy on the worldbuilding that the worldbuilding was more like three or four characters in its own right. The five Hothouse stories were collectively awarded the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction. [1] The fungus (or the morel)- what a brilliant idea! The morel is a sentient fungus that enhances the intelligence of creatures it forms symbiotic relationships with.( There is even an indication that that is how people became smart in the first place)As a thing, character or villain- I don't know what to call it-it's well-though and incorporated into a story. to 5.0 stars. This book is all about WORLD-BUILDING and Brian Aldiss has created a TRIPtastically SUPERB vision of a “far future” Earth unlike anything I have ever read. In the distant future, evolution has decided to BOOT the “Animal Kingdon” square in the nether-regions…

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss | Goodreads Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss | Goodreads

The characters I liked most from the outset either died off or were MIA for all or most of the remainder of the book, like the too few insects, such as the bee-creature on the book cover, seen here: The plants and vegetation evolved so greatly that many lifeforms mirrored and imitated animals from our time-period, not only in behavioral patterns and functionality, but in many cases, even in their physical description. Having been invited by Icon Books, in early 2021, to write a climate change book, I had been thinking long and hard about what I wanted to say, because I was taking an angle that I knew might not be popular, and which some would inevitably call out as alarmist. The book’s principal message is that it is now practicably impossible for us to avoid a 1.5°C global average temperature rise (since pre-industrial times), a threshold typically equated with the dangerous climate change ‘guardrail’. Beyond this, climate breakdown will become all-pervasive, affecting everyone on the planet and insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. Certainly, as it stands, Britain – although relatively well placed to counter the worst effects of the coming climate breakdown – faces major headaches. Heatwaves will become more frequent, get hotter and last longer. Huge numbers of modern, tiny, poorly insulated UK homes will become heat traps, responsible for thousands of deaths every summer by 2050. Always trouble, always difficulty, always some fresh trouble to living! Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!The book succeeds for me on its lasting psychological feelings about teeming life forms and its atmospherics of horror and wonder over the precariousness of the life of an individual and our species. After recent reads of science books on the current human caused threats to biological diversity of the planet, it was fascinating for me to experience a scenario where excessive diversity among plants puts us almost out of the picture. As if realizing that this ruined its method of defence, the plant drooped in the shade, a picture of vegetable dejection with its flowers and is urns hanging limply." Although it came out in the sixties, this book has an even older-school sci-fi tone. It focuses on big ideas and world-building and leaves the characters pretty bare. A wonderfully imagined fantasy world with shit characters and an excruciatingly boring plot. I didn't enjoy this as much as I expected to but it's got a pretty good rep so it might be worth your time. Hothouse is an extremely weird novel that explores a speculative future in which the world is dominated by deadly and murderous plants.