At the Earth's Core
The keystone hollow-earth adventure, launching a seven-book series (Tarzan eventually visits).
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Hothouse about?
Aeons hence, a tidally locked Earth swelters under a swollen sun, the Moon is webbed to the planet by mile-long spider-plant traversers, and vegetation has devoured the animal kingdom — humanity survives as green, thumb-sized tribes in the branches of a single world-girdling banyan. Young Gren's journey through this magnificent bestiary (the tummy-belly men, the intelligent fungus Morel, which colonises his head and turns mentor-parasite) is pure invention at full throttle. Scientific plausibility was cheerfully sacrificed; sense of wonder profited enormously.
Why it matters
Hugo winner in its original short-fiction form (1962). The gold standard of far-future ecological phantasmagoria, godfather to Vance-flavoured dying-Earth visions ever since.
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