Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

In the last few years, I’ve run into a new genre label. "Cli-Fi," for the uninitiated, refers to science fiction stories built on global warming scenarios. Many of these works are formulaic, and as predictable as a Meryl Streep Oscar nomination, but the best of them—say Ian McEwan's Solar or Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl—transcend genre labels and…