Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide

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Never had there been such an overcrowding of the world. No bare places existed. Sometimes the dumblers ** floated through the jungles for centuries, waiting to alight, epitomizing a vegetable loneliness. Some characters should be referred to as he, and they were as she, and vice-versa. And little things here and there that just needed to be tweaked. 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. It engages with environmental concerns, conjuring up a future that has occurred after ecological and societal collapse. Global warming has caused the world to heat-up and human civilisation to wither and die. The remnants have been forced to change and adapt to survive. Radiation has altered their minds and their bodies to the point where they are no longer fully human, but something different. And in some cases, they have fused (or are controlled by) the plant life that has conquered the earth.

hothouse, but one day 40C The terrifying truth: Britain’s a hothouse, but one day 40C

Yes, weirder than giant plant-spiders climbing enormous beanstalks to journey between the Earth and Moon.) Along the journey, Gren and his group (and the reader) are shown a whole host of very interesting creatures and plants and that is really where this book hits it out of the park. I was fascinated by the world from the very beginning and pretty much stayed that way through to the end. The characters are not particularly well developed and you never really “identify” with them which may cause some people to be less engaged with the story. However, for me it was all about the amazingly imagined environment Aldiss created and that is the reason to read this book. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions,” Michael R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep Canadell, Gernot Klepper, and Christopher Field; PNAS, 2007 They find themselves at the terminator, the boundary between the day and night sides. To their horror, they realise they are being carried over it. After a long journey, the seed stops near the top of a mountain, which is tall enough to still be lit by the low sun. There, Yattmur gives birth to Gren's child; Gren, increasingly taken over by the morel, wants the baby to host it as well. They meet the Sharp-furs, tribal baboons who use speech, and then they are approached by the Sodal Ye, a highly-evolved fish, and his three human servants. In return for food, the Sodal Ye thinks of a way to remove the morel from Gren's head by coaxing it into a bowl. The future is forbidding from this perspective, though McGuire stresses that if carbon emissions can be cut substantially in the near future, and if we start to adapt to a much hotter world today, a truly calamitous and unsustainable future can be avoided. The days ahead will be grimmer, but not disastrous. We may not be able to give climate breakdown the slip but we can head off further instalments that would appear as a climate cataclysm bad enough to threaten the very survival of human civilisation.

Hothouse Earth by Bill McGuire | Waterstones

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. Estimates vary significantly, but there could be anywhere between 250 million – 2 billion climate refugees within the next 80 years. To have a hardy and evolved fungus drop upon you in the middle of the jungle to give you heightened intelligence, you'd think that would be a good thing, right? Galaxy reviewer Floyd C. Gale praised the novel as "a tour-de-force guaranteed to startle the most blasé SF buff." [3] Magazine stories [ edit ] Is that high praise? Yes. Do I see why one of the short stories that made up this novel won the Hugo in '62? Yes. Can I imagine that during the 5 year time that Frank Herbert was writing Dune, he got inspired while reading the magazines these stories were published? Yes.Selbst als philosophische Novelle mit kafkaeskem Charakter gibt das Buch so nicht besonders viel her. Sie strotzt vor erzählerischen, literarischen und Logikfehlern. Wie der Autor damit einen Preis gewinnen konnte ist mir schleierhaft. Both, and I suspect that is a particularly sharp feature in British writing when there is not just the taking into account of the reality of living with the possibility of destruction through atomic war but also an adaptation to the loss of Empire, have a sense of human societies and civilisations as transitory. Here I make plain my view that science fiction and fantasy writing is never about the fantastic nor the fictional possibilities of science but about contemporary concerns. In Aldiss this is a theme that is there also in Earthworks and most richly expressed in The Helliconia Trilogy. Aldiss here though doesn't have the same fixation that early Ballard does on the dramatic and sudden transition from one state to another. Aldiss's interest in the temporary and contingent nature of our human lives, I feel is more philosophical and certainly more abstract than Ballards which is as visceral as you would expect given his experiences as related in a slightly fictionalised form in Empire of the Sun. But I may well be misleading myself on the basis of Aldiss beginning and ending The Helliconia Trilogy with quotations from Lucretius, which no doubt predisposed me to assume an equally philosophical turn to Aldiss' mind. Message on the Eiffel Tower as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assembles in Paris, 2007 Only five great families survived among the rampant green life; the tigerflies, the treebees, the plantants and the termights were social insects mighty and invincible. And the fifth family was man, lowly and easily killed, not organized as the insects were, but not extinct, the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world." 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

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide - Softcover - AbeBooks Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide - Softcover - AbeBooks

In the real world, that is not going to happen,” says McGuire. “Instead, we are on course for close to a 14% rise in emissions by that date – which will almost certainly see us shatter the 1.5C guardrail in less than a decade.” Further, Harlan Ellison - whose short story collection, Deathbird Stories, I like a lot - just LOVED IT!! Even though I loved the worldbuilding, the characters put me off. The various tribes, reduced to stupid creatures, were quite hard to root for. The tummybellies, which are supposed to be the fun part of the story, are the most annoying and I couldn’t help resonating with Gren, our main character, on this, even if I didn’t approve on his behaviour.

Customer reviews

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. Originally Hothouse consisted of 5 short stories serialised in a magazine and eventually published as a whole. These 5 short stories were collectively awarded the 1962 Hugo Award for short fiction. One of the things I absolutely loved about this novel were the vivid descriptions of this future world. I had a feeling like I got a tan while I was reading this book. The author is so wildly imaginative when he writes about different life forms. I think that biologists would enjoy this one. You almost feel like you’re watching a really great nature documentary. It feels that real! There is originally both in the setting and in the story. That feeling of life growing fanatically in the final days of a dying sun- it’s there, you can feel it. That is what I loved the most. I really felt a part of this world. The opening sequence and subsequent introduction to this world comes in the form of the most basic unit of humanity at the time - a matriarchal family unit of several adults and their offspring. Their forays brought to mind scenes from "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" with the climbing of giant stalks and nightmarish giant insects - but with, more often than not, less forgiving and more lethal repercussions - one wrong move equals death (and there are deaths aplenty).