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. (1925-2017) UK anthologist, editor, artist, critic and author, married to Margaret Aldiss, whose early death he commemorated in When the Feast Is Finished: Reflections on Terminal Illness ( 1999) educated at private schools, which he conspicuously disliked.A Hugo Award–winning classic about a far-future Earth dominated by gargantuan plants and the few humans who remain He served from 1943 through World War Two in the Royal Corps of Signals in India, Burma and Sumatra, being demobilized in 1947 these four years provided him with background material throughout his career, and are specifically recreated in the nonfantastic Horatio Stubbs sequence (see below). He then worked as an assistant in Oxford bookshops, an experience he transformed into a series of fictionalized sketches about bookselling as by Peter Pica in the trade magazine The Bookseller these were later assembled as his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (coll 1955).

At about the same time, he began to write fiction, most of it sf or fantasy, remaining over the next 60 years or more a dominant figure in British and world sf.Īldiss began publishing work of genre interest with 'Criminal Record' in Science Fantasy for July 1954. There followed such notable tales as 'Outside' (January 1955 New Worlds), 'Not for an Age' (9 January 1955 Observer) as by Arch Mendicant, which was the third-prize winner in an Observer sf competition whose stories appeared pseudonymously and were voted on by readers, 'There is a Tide' (February 1956 New Worlds) and 'Psyclops' (July 1956 New Worlds), all of which appeared in his first collection, Space, Time and Nathaniel (Presciences) (coll 1957).

No Time Like Tomorrow (coll 1959) reprints six stories from the fourteen in Space, Time and Nathaniel and adds another six.

These early stories were ingeniously dark, lyrically exuberant, and intermittently laced with humour.

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss