Long Afternoon before the Chthulucene

Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) presents a vegetal world that has become favorable for plant life while increasingly hostile to animals, especially humans, which has usually been interpreted as a form of “stasis,” a death-world shaped by Aldiss’ wartime experiences in the jungles of Southeast Asia. This article challenges such a reading, arguing instead that Hothouse imagines an emergent, transformative world that exceeds static categorization. Rather than a landscape of arrest, it constitutes an embryonic post-anthropocentric ecology characterized by the dissolution of boundaries between animal and plant, life and matter, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. This world remains perpetually open to processes of merging and metamorphosis. Engaging with contemporary debates in new materialism, the article reads the banyan world of the novel as a speculative framework for contemplating nonhuman agency (Jane Bennett), unthought (N. Katherine Hayles), dark ecology (Timothy Morton), and the Chthulucene (Donna J. Haraway).