I would say the world was the best part, but I actually found reading the worldbuilding and scene-setting a bit of a slog. The book follows one human as he journeys across his world, often at the behest of a superintelligent morel, and encounters different aspects of the amazing ecosystem. The warming of Earth (from natural causes) has caused a massive proliferation and evolution of plant life, and thus the downfall of the human race, which exists only in isolated pockets of depressed intelligence. Though not the earliest by far, Hothouse is still a pretty early example of the climate apocalypse subgenre. There definitely are arresting, interesting images. The same year Aldiss won the Hugo (there is a funny story about this in my Penguin Modern Classics edition), the five stories were published as a fix-up. Even beyond that, the rules didn't work the way they work now the five "Hothouse" stories have a collective wordcount in the novel range, and thus if the sequence was nominated as a unit these days, it would have to be in Best Novel. 1959 had seen categories for Best Short Story and Best Novelette, but from 1960 to 1966, there was just a singular Best Short Fiction category. In 1962, Brian Aldiss won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction for the "Hothouse" sequence of stories.
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