This was another audio-book, or in fact an abridged audio version as recorded from Radio 7. I wasn’t going to do this again but then I got behind and well I did listen to it all the way through.
Hothouse is weird. It’s SciFi, and it’s probably the kind of thing a younger me would have loved. It’s set on earth in the far future when the world is no longer spinning and entire continents are cover in vegetation. And the vegetation is huge, sometime mobile, occasionally carnivourous and well, a bit weird. In the world we follow a group of humans who live in a simple tribal culture. Their main focus is to stay alive “in the green” where there are so many forms of plant (and a few insect) life that want to kill them.
If you’re sensing a downbeat tone to this review you’d be right. I actually started out enjoying Hothouse but in the end the same thing that grabbed my attention wore it thin – it’s an alien world with so few reference points that everything is strange. Not only that but the characters are simplistic, so without anyone to really care about, once you get bored with the novelty of how this plant-filled planet works that’s not a lot else to grab you.
5/10 – inventive but lacking real heart.