Hugos 1962: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

Collection originally published: 1962
Contents originally published: 1961
Acquired: September 2020
Read: October 2020

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

In 1962, Brian Aldiss won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction for the "Hothouse" sequence of stories. 1959 had seen categories for Best Short Story and Best Novelette, but from 1960 to 1966, there was just a singular Best Short Fiction category. Even beyond that, the rules didn't work the way they work now; the five "Hothouse" stories have a collective wordcount in the novel range, and thus if the sequence was nominated as a unit these days, it would have to be in Best Novel. The same year Aldiss won the Hugo (there is a funny story about this in my Penguin Modern Classics edition), the five stories were published as a fix-up, and I decided to read it as one of my Hugo "bonus" books between the winners of Best Novel for 1958 and 1963.

I both can and cannot see why this won. There definitely are arresting, interesting images. Though not the earliest by far, Hothouse is still a pretty early example of the climate apocalypse subgenre. The warming of Earth (from natural causes) has caused a massive proliferation and evolution of plant life, and thus the downfall of the human race, which exists only in isolated pockets of depressed intelligence. The book follows one human as he journeys across his world, often at the behest of a superintelligent morel, and encounters different aspects of the amazing ecosystem. I would say the world was the best part, but I actually found reading the worldbuilding and scene-setting a bit of a slog. There is some neat stuff here, but it feels buried in a dull, aimless travelogue about dull, aimless people, and the exposition itself was often dull and aimless too; I was rarely excited to pick the book back up, and it took me a while to read despite being only 250 pages. I've liked some of Aldiss's short fiction that I've read, and he made good editorial choices in his Galactic Empires anthologies, but this is the first of his novels that I've picked up (for certain definitions of "novel") and it doesn't make me want to read another one. Not bad per se... but it never clicked with me. I kind of feel like I'd rather look at some illustrations of the world that Aldiss created!

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick