Imagining Plant-Like Futures? Vegetal Intelligence in Brian Aldiss' Hothouse (1962)

Abstract

In Through Vegetal Being (2016, written with Luce Irigaray), Michael Marder asserts that "by robbing plants of their time, and especially of their future, we deny a future to human and all other living beings" (144). For Marder and other critical plant studies scholars, the future of humanity is contingent on our alignment with vegetal temporality and the envisaging of a societal order with peculiarly plant-like attributes. In his deconstruction of Western metaphysics, Marder appears in alignment with the ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna (1989), whose heuristic "plan/plant/planet" positions the botanical kingdom as a creative organisational matrix for the twenty-first century. How might we imagine humanity in 2050 as more plant-like—as in higher synchronisation with vegetal temporality in our scientific, technological, cultural, and interpersonal pursuits? How might we resist denying a future to plants and, thus, to ourselves and other beings? And how might the genre of science fiction enable us to build up the imaginative faculties and transgressive outlooks required for doing so? In the context of these questions, this article 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. Humans grapple in the narrative with the threat of extinction by, for instance, seeking refuge in the canopy of a gargantuan banyan tree. I argue that works of science fiction, such as Hothouse, narrativize the ideas of Marder and McKenna by allowing readers to suspend chronos-inflected, reductionistic conceptions of plants. The first step toward a plant-like future—if that is even desirable in the first place—is the eschewing of conventional ideas of vegetal nature as a relatively unmoving, unfeeling, non-sentient constituent of our perceptual domains.