Without farmland, massive famine results.

Destroying ecodiversity and crowding out every native species, the plants seem to have no nutritional value to humans or animals. Everywhere, giant alien plants are growing, resistant to every herbicide that research labs and governments have been able to produce. This 1965 novelette has held up remarkably well to the test of time.Įarth has been ‘seeded' with mysterious spores from space. So, all those problems, understood back in the sixties - how many of them have we solved? And how many have got worse? ( ) Other major problems facing humanity and indeed, much of life on Earth, were also being tackled back then, for instance population control, in, a lesser known but tremendously fun novel in which a society trying to cope with a human population of one trillion is examined. Other SF writers were working on the general environmental theme and the problems of bio-accumulating insecticides specifically back then, being a prime example. Really, this is the fictional equivalent of the extra-ordinarily influential popular science work. And global climate change - this has the earliest reference to the Greenhouse Effect of any piece of fiction I've read, as far as I can remember. And turning over huge land areas to mono-culture crop growth.

It is in fact about spraying the garden - with dodgy chemicals. But that isn't really what this book is about. nigh-on every alien invader story from the 1950s on. or humanity's intrinsic superior adaptability and inventiveness e.g. The story is interesting and the bleak but realistic idea that if aliens with interstellar travel technology turned up here and didn't like us we wouldn't stand an - Earthly? - chance is in stark contrast to the much more commonplace scenario that the aliens will be defeated by their own hubris e.g.

Despite the likely imminent extinction of the species, people still can't stop themselves from getting involved in destructive power politics and personal rivalries. A band of survivors in the former USA struggle against Plants, aliens and - themselves. Machines are systematically wiping out not merely humans, but all mammals. At one point in this novel a character expresses the view, 'I'm not sure if we've been invaded or if they're just spraying the garden.' Aliens have seeded the Earth with giant Plants that tend to eliminate all other plants by out-competing them for basic resources such as water and sunlight.

The genocides by thomas m disch