Hothouse, Aldiss’s next major work, like many novels of its time, was written and published serially, in magazine form, in America. It was written as a linked sequence of five novelettes, which were collectively given the Hugo Award (the science fiction field’s Oscar) in 1962, for Best Short Fiction. (Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land took the Hugo for Best Novel.)

There had been prominent English science fiction writers before Aldiss, writing for the American market—Arthur C. Clarke, for example, or Eric Frank Russell—but Aldiss came on the scene after the so-called Golden Age was over, began to write at a point where science fiction was beginning to introspect. Authors like Aldiss and his contemporaries, such as J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, were part of the sea change that would produce, in the second half of the sixties, coagulating around the Michael Moorcock–edited New Worlds, what would become known as the “New Wave”: science fiction that relied on the softer sciences, on style, on experimentation. And although Hothouse predates the New Wave, it can also be seen as one of the seminal works that created it, or that showed that the change had come.

Aldiss continued to experiment in form and content, experimenting with prose comedic, psychedelic and literary. His Horatio Stubbs Saga, published between 1971 and 1978, a sequence of three books which dealt with the youth, education and war experiences in Burma of a young man whose experiences parallel Aldiss’s, were bestsellers, a first for Aldiss. In the early 1980s he returned to classical science fiction with the magisterial Helliconia sequence, which imagined a planet with immensely long seasons orbiting two suns, and examined the life-forms and biological cycles of the planet, and the effect on the planet’s human observers, in an astonishing exercise in world-building.

Restlessly creative, relentlessly fecund, Brian Aldiss has created continually, and just as his hothouse Earth brings forth life of all shapes and kinds, unpredictable, delightful and dangerous, so has Aldiss. His characters and his worlds, whether in his mainstream fiction, his science fiction, or in the books that are harder to classify, such as the experimental, surreal Report on Probability A, are always engaged in, to use graphic novelist Eddie Campbell’s phrase, the dance of Lifey Death.

Hothouse was Aldiss’s second substantial SF novel. It is an uncompromising book, and it exists simultaneously in several science fictional traditions (for it is science fiction, even if the image at the heart of the story, of a moon and Earth that do not spin, bound together by huge spidery webs, is an image from fantasy).

It is a novel of a far-future Earth, set at the end of this planet’s life, when all our current concerns are forgotten, our cities are long gone and abandoned. (The moments in the ruins of what I take to be Calcutta, as the Beauty chants long-forgotten political slogans from a time in our distant future, are a strange reminder of a world millions of years abandoned and irrelevant.)