Customer Reviews

The Long Afternoon of Earth

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Much of this book is stunning in its scope and originality. We are in the far distant future in the last days of the earth before the sun goes nova. The sun is so much hotter that all animal life has died and plants have taken over the earth making it an incredibly lush green jungle. All animal life has died but one species -- man -- and he is barely hanging on, literally in the branches of the great banyan tree that spans the continent. It's this view of man, not as lord of creation but as the last survivor of the animal kingdom that gives the book its power. That and the image of a green earth that is an incredibly dangerous place. It's a plant eat plant world. We follow the adventures of a boy as he discovers the world and we start to follow the adventures of some other humans that get accidentally taken to the moon by a mile long flying vegetable that is one of the stunningly creative ideas in the story. I gave the novel four stars instead of five because it is too short. With everything that happens you expect a grand ending and instead it feels rushed. The adventures on the moon are cut short and forgotten and the boy's adventures seem abruptly ended with a kind of conventional happy ending. Despite this one great flaw, this is a book well worth reading for it's sheer generosity of imagination. In it's own unique and crazy way, it's a classic.

This is one of those books to force the mind away from the everyday, the mundane, the what's-happening-today-in-Bongo Bongoland-and-what-are-we-doing-about-it that has our minds squeezed so tight we can't think further than the next daily broadcast of the world news and the next spoon-fed opinion from our favorite demigogue. The planet earth has a future that might, or mightn't include a fragile, two-legged creature who thinks he owns it all. In this book it includes him, but he doesn't own it.

The Long Afternoon of Earth is a lesson in perspective, in humility, in one of the many possible futures of mankind when all the wars have been fought and forgotten, when all the nations and political parties have had their sparks of glory and died. It's a world of no heroes, no cowards, no real signifance except the same one mankind faced in his deepest history: survival. There's a touch of wistfulness here, a touch of melancholy. But it's a good lever to pry your mind away from the mess your dog made on the livingroom floor, the mess your favorite politician made on the floor of your big ideas, the mess your nation made on the face of a planet that goes on and on, where human affairs and the centuries are an insignificant spark.

Read it.

"The Long Afternoon of Earth" is about life on Earth an unimaginably long time from now. Man's civilization is long gone, and humans are a minor species struggling for survival in an ecology dominated by highly evolved plants. Some of the science in this novel has been superceded or is simply wrong, but that does not change the fact that this is an imaginative and enjoyable story about the ultimate fate of mankind and the Earth itself. In this novel life is within a foreseeable distance of its end as the sun is becoming unstable. The world is incredibly dangerous for humans who can do little more than survive, if that.

I first read this novel as a small boy, and it stoked my interest in science fiction--an interest that I maintain to this day. A book that can do that has a lot going for it.

Recommended. RJB.

This book cannot be judged by today's sci-fi standards. Allthough it lacks the unrelenting agglutination to proved science ( which I'm all for ), it has other great adventages ; It's huge scope-as a child it really shown me for the first time that man's mind and curiosity know no bounds. The way man-in the story- is just another type of creature and nothing more , that has taught me humility.

THE PLOT : chronologicaly we're millions of years in the future. the earth is no longer revolving on it's axis , and show one side to the sun constantly.

A huge , single tree has taken over the whole lit side of earth , and all the life that exist live under it's shadow (if it's strong and wild enaugh to survive), or on and between the branches (if it's feeble like the 30cm green humans).

It's the story of Gant. A human that has glimpses of racial-memory through an intelligent fungus that has taken over him , and has it's own reasons to gain manouevrability and take Gant on a trek across the world and even to moon.

A book written in the old style of sci-fi , which I call "pre-campbellian".

Very , very recommended.

Strange as it may sound, Aldiss is a master of describing new people in new worlds. Take for example his novel Starswarm where Aldiss writes wonderful space opera of sociology and culture from future-humans. Well, here in Long Afternoon, Aldiss writes of Earth which has lost it's spin and vegetation grows unhindered on the sunny-side of Earth. The vegetables (as Aldiss calls them) inhabit every imaginable niche in this world to the point where the vegetables slink, crawl, jump and even fly. This comes after Earth has been scoured by hard radiation from the sun for millions of years, so who is to say it's absurd? Humans, too, have evolved (or rather devolved) to look like 1-foot tall green midgets who live in the branches of a giant banyan tree.

The sheer premise of the book is impressive and must have been a daunting challenge, even to a SF master like Aldiss. The plot unfolds when the elders give themselves up to the transversers to be sent into the heaven above, where they find what they least expected. This seems like a short story after it jumps back to the botany below and follows the young through the trees, to the exotic beach with it's termight (sic) civilization and out into the ocean where their adventure abounds. The 'tree-hugging' humans aren't the only type of humans still left... and so the story continues until it unexpectedly joins with the first story in the last 90% of the book.

It's a bit disjointed between the two stories and the dialogue it flat, which are the only two low points in the book. Otherwise, superbly imagined and written!

Although written 20 years earlier, "The Long Afternoon of Earth" bears a strong resemblance to Aldiss' later "Helliconia" series. The main point of these books is to explore a world in which astronomical influences have drastically altered the climate. "Afternoon" is set billions of years in the Earth's future, when tidal forces have slowed Earth's rotation to the point where one side of the planet always faces the aging Sun, while the other side is in perpetual darkness. The book takes us on a tour of this world, to see how the creatures of Earth have adapted to this profound change.

In "Helliconia" and "Afternoon", characters are secondary. The book is not about them; they merely serve as tour guides, leading the reader on a trip through the various regions of the planet. In fact, Aldiss' protagonists tend to be unlikable. This keeps the readers and characters at arm's length, so the focus remains where it belongs, on the world itself. Gren, the main character in "Afternoon," is clever, but ignorant, selfish and brutish. You don't root for him, and you learn not to expect much of him. You simply follow him as he travels, encountering with him the strange and dangerous beauty of the latter day Earth.

Similarly, the plot is threadbare, almost an afterthought. The book is not about the story, either, and at times that can be frustrating. For example, early in the book, several humans, as part of a rite of passage in old age, hitch a ride on a "traverser" (a mile-long spider-like vegetable) from Earth through space to the Moon. There, they are tapped by others to lead an invasion of the home world. Clearly, you think, this is "The Story." However, the scenario is no sooner set up than it is abandoned. The invaders are not heard from again until 5 pages from the end of the book, when they show up briefly, accomplish nothing, then leave.

And that's okay. Even without a decent story or characters, this is still a fascinating book. I am awed by the sheer power of Aldiss' creativity in fleshing out this strange world. Many of the creatures, defense mechanisms, and lifecycles that Aldiss envisions are truly ingenious. On the day side, increased sunlight has propelled plant life to the dominant position in nature. Plants now fill most niches formerly filled by animals; they can move, eat, see, climb, think, even fly. The teeming jungles of the day side are savage, and the battle for existence fierce. Humans are the only true animals to have survived, albeit in a devolved, primitive state. It may sound far-fetched, but Aldiss does an admirable job of making the world not only plausible, but real.

As long as you approach "Long Afternoon of Earth" as a travelogue, and don't expect to find enduring characters or an intricate plot, it is an amazing trip through a bizarre world that happens to be our own. It is a well-crafted speculation on what Earth might be like in the distant future, and how life might adapt to such extreme circumstances. Even with its defects, I couldn't put it down. It is a trip well worth taking.

The first seventy-five pages of this novel (roughly corresponding to the original installment of the short story sequence) are among the most inventive, spellbinding and mysterious you'll read in all contemporary literature. If you haven't read the book yet, it's worth paying more than this price to read the beginning of this book.

However I chose four, rather than five stars for one reason. The highly unique style and general mystery present early in the book, begins to evaporate over the remaining pages very quickly. Aldiss becomes far too explicative about the origins of the floral world and takes a progressively more pessimistic view about his audience's ability (and desire) to figure these things out for themselves. The ''sensawunda'' factor also becomes very extreme, to the point where few settings or organisms reappear after their initial introduction.

Doubly, most of the very compelling generalizations about the nature of the world described in the first part of the book, are systematically disproven in the later chapters. It turns out that the banyan doesn't cover all available sunlit space, that there are in fact remaining mammals apart from green men around and so on. This is profoundly disappointing for the reader who was quite taken with the original context the book created.

Another obvious (and often complained about) problem is that the humans -originally presented as devolved, degenerated shells of their earlier species- become progressively more intelligent and verbose as the novel progresses. The use of the Morel to explain this otherwise inexplicable evolution of cognitive power is unconvincing, as more characters than Gren achieve progressively enhanced analytical and communicative powers for no apparent reason. For example, early in the book, the longest speech the human characters had ever heard, is about three short sentences long and it was difficult for them to hold attention to it due to its length. Later, the human characters expound for paragraphs without difficulty in expression or comprehension. Often too, they are doing so whilst conveying a conceptual understanding about situations and events they could never possess were they indeed the creatures found in the opening of the novel.

The book is very similar to Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity in this respect. In that much like the creatures of Meskalin, they become progressively less alien not because we develop sympathies and connections to a common humanity...but because they start acting and talking increasingly like us.

This loss of mystique is one of the only reasons the book could be reasonably criticized in my view. Apart from it, it's among the most original and enchanting science fiction novels of the 1960s.

This noted novel was originally a series of science fiction short stories which appeared in 1960 and 1961 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (in fact, the series was awarded the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction short stories of the year). Certain critics have remarked that this is one of the best science fiction books to appear in the early 1960s. I have later learned that the American publisher made considerable editorial changes in the original novel; much later, Aldiss republished this work without those changes. Unfortunately, this is not that newer version. But, the book is required reading of any serious student of science fiction literature. The novel takes place on an Earth in the extremely distant future. This Earth has ceased to rotate about its axis; thus, one side faces the sun while the other side is constantly in the dark. Almost all animal life has disappeared, with just a few representatives left. Plant life has taken over the planet, much of it feeding on other plants or what remains of animal life. The land on the sunny side is covered by a giant banyan tree upon which other plants live and thrive. In this tree also live the remnants of humans, who are now one-fifth their original size and have no memory of what they once were. The "hero" of the story is a young male named Gant who, in his travels, is infected by a sentient fungus called a morel. This fungus is able to uncover man's racial memories and, in so doing, helps Gant to learn to think and analyze for himself. Also included in the story are the Traversers, enormous gas-bag vegetable spiders that have the ability to travel through space. They regularly travel between the Earth and the Moon, which now has a more hospitable environment. However, Aldiss has the moon in a stationary position about the Earth (an astronomical impossibility even in the distant future!). Also, if I recall correctly, he places the Moon in a Trojan orbit. If so, that would place the Moon millions of miles from Earth. The moon would only be a small dot in the sky (and might not even be seen from the sunny-side Earth).

I first read this book when i was 15 years old and I was an instant Brian Aldiss fan. This book is kind of short, but it's one you want to read slowly so that you don't miss anything. And it can be hard to miss things since at times there is a lot going on. The end of the book is my favorite part because its really bizarre. If you like sci fi that's not all aliens and technical than I bet you'll like this book.

This book stole 4 hours of my life that I will never get back. I could go on, but I'm not going to, because this book just stole 1 more minute as I write this review.

I believe believe that SciFi should be hard, by definition. Go read something by Charles Sheffield.