Un livre étrange, déroutant par son point de vue sur une apocalypse discrète et silencieuse, avec une humanité pathétique vivant ses derniers instants en s'accrochant à des espoirs bien ténus... Le roman pourrait constituer une forme de préambule lointain au Monde vert d'Aldiss, c'en est assez troublant. ( )

Primero llegan las gigantescas plantas verdes y cubren la Tierra, asfixiando toda otra forma de vida. Luego, llegan los incineradores y completan el exterminio.

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. Machines are systematically wiping out not merely humans, but all mammals. A band of survivors in the former USA struggle against Plants, aliens and - themselves. Despite the likely imminent extinction of the species, people still can't stop themselves from getting involved in destructive power politics and personal rivalries. It feels depressingly realistic.

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. [b:The War of the Worlds|8909|The War of the Worlds|H.G. Wells|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391644s/8909.jpg|3194841] or humanity's intrinsic superior adaptability and inventiveness e.g. nigh-on every alien invader story from the 1950s on. But that isn't really what this book is about. It is in fact about spraying the garden - with dodgy chemicals. And turning over huge land areas to mono-culture crop growth. 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. Really, this is the fictional equivalent of the extra-ordinarily influential popular science work, [b:Silent Spring|27333|Silent Spring|Rachel Carson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167880280s/27333.jpg|880193]. Other SF writers were working on the general environmental theme and the problems of bio-accumulating insecticides specifically back then, [b:The Green Brain|53727|The Green Brain|Frank Herbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312041560s/53727.jpg|3634593] being a prime example. Other major problems facing humanity and indeed, much of life on Earth, were also being tackled back then, for instance population control, in [b:A Torrent of Faces|2324240|A Torrent of Faces|James Blish|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nocover/60x80.png|2330764], a lesser known but tremendously fun [a:James Blish|43625|James Blish|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1227585761p2/43625.jpg] novel in which a society trying to cope with a human population of one trillion is examined.

So, all those problems, understood back in the sixties - how many of them have we solved? And how many have got worse? ( )

This was my first book by Thomas Disch. I had heard and read much about his classic SF works. Am I a fan? To early to say.

This book was well written and interesting. I didn't like the story or the depressing and dreadful ending. Yes, he is a good writer. But I have to like the story. This didn't work for me. I will read other works by this author. ( )

This 1965 novelette has held up remarkably well to the test of time.
Earth has been ‘seeded' with mysterious spores from space. Everywhere, giant alien plants are growing, resistant to every herbicide that research labs and governments have been able to produce. Destroying ecodiversity and crowding out every native species, the plants seem to have no nutritional value to humans or animals. Without farmland, massive famine results. The cities, dependent on farms for food, are first to collapse.
The last pockets of civilization may be farm villages...
In one such Minnesota village, a farmer rules his family and the survivors from his village as a dictatorial patriarch... harsh, but with survival at heart. But he is old, and in ill-health, and times are hard and getting harder. As the characters vie with each other over power and relationships, we see that even desperation is not enough to overcome human pettiness and just plain stupidity.
There's definitely some Biblical allusions going on... although the patriarch is also a religious leader, we see his ‘flock' violate pretty much every one of the Ten Commandments, and commit pretty much every one of the Seven Deadly Sins. They believe they may be being punished by God – but the reality is that humanity itself may be simply beneath the notice of who- or what-ever has caused this destruction.

Very bleak – very, very bleak. But also quite witty and entertaining ( )