Imagining Plant-like Futures? Vegetal Intelligence in Brian Aldiss' Hothouse

Abstract

How might we imagine humanity in the future as more plant-like - as in higher synchronisation with the particular temporalities of botanical life in our scientific, technological, cultural and interpersonal pursuits? How might humanity resist denying a future to plants and, thus, to ourselves and other living beings? And how might the genre of science fiction enable us to develop the imaginative faculties and transgressive outlooks required for doing so? This chapter will undertake a reading of Brian Aldiss' Hothouse, recipient of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction. The novel is a work of futuristic science-fiction with prominent vegetal protagonists, such as omnivorous spider-like plants. In the narrative, humans grapple with the threat of extinction by, for instance, seeking refuge in the canopy of a gargantuan banyan tree. This chapter argues that works of science fiction, such as Hothouse, narrativise the idea of a plant-like future by allowing readers to suspend chronos-inflected, reductionistic conceptions of the botanical world. The first step towards a plantlike future - as this chapter will conclude - is the refiguring of conventional ideas of plant nature as a relatively unmoving, unfeeling and non-sentient constituent of our perceptual domains.