Customer Reviews

The long afternoon of Earth

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Don't fall in love with any of the characters because he or she might be dead very soon. At least, that's the way things go in the first two parts of this novel which follow a group of youngsters surviving (or not) in the jungle that has taken over much of the Earth's surface in the distant future, when the plant kingdom includes very mobile predators. That last part of the novel focuses on a boy's relatively lonely adventure.

The brutality of nature is given full play in the hands of British author Brian Aldiss in a way that American authors, at the time, avoided. It stunned me when I first read it many many years ago.

Aldiss is not a scientist and the premises of this novel should not be examined and judged by scientific standards. It's an adventure story and a mood piece. And like many scifi novels of the time, it was built up of short stories published in magazines.

The British title was HOTHOUSE and the Brits speak derisively of the longer American title, THE LONG AFTERNOON OF EARTH (Amazon's title is in error) which I unabashedly prefer as more evocative and alluring. The American version with its longer title ironically had less text since some of the original British version was excised. I have read both versions and don't feel the full version is superior in effect to the abridged (while others swear it is).