the world has stopped spinning in the far far future and so one side is lightside and one side is darkside and man has devolved into little green aboriginals who cherish their little horny men and are led by their little fierce women. Aldiss is a boundary-pushing writer and his new wave bonafides means he can write however he wants to write, he'll do what he wants to do. the world is a hothouse of seething angry vegetation, predatory plants that fly and sting and capture and kill, leviathan plants that sail like airwhales from earth to moon and back again and like giant spiders spin webs to connect the two places and like giant gourds can nourish the travelers that hide within. Aldiss is a creative writer and his imagination is as fecund and overripe as his lush and bizarre world and he just never stops with the creatures they keep coming and coming and coming. this world is in battle with itself, life against life, vegetable and animal alike, it's a frenzy of stalking and eating and killing and dying and it's all violent, all the time, here at the end of the world. Aldiss wrote this as five separate novelettes so there are five fairly separate adventures that don't really flow into each other but who needs flow, the narrative stops and starts and does what it wants to do, just like the author. the world is circumnavigated by the book's protagonist, a stubborn green rather unlikeable 10-year-old who knows how to kill and how to mate and how to look forward and who spends half the book with a creepy morel fungus growing into his head and shoulders that talks to him and expands his mind and cruelly manipulates him and this fungus is kinda the most sympathetic character in the book, and that was definitely a first for me. Aldiss is an author who does things first.
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