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BOOK REVIEWS--SCIENCE FICTION
The Plants
by Kenneth McKenny
©1976
Bantam Books
When I first started reading The Plants, I thought "What a tired, cheesy concept". I tried to keep in mind that it is from 1976 and follows the disaster and ecodisaster trend that was popular in film at the time, playing off of people’s paranoia regarding our control over nature. Blah, blah, blah, heard it all before. When I finished reading the book my reaction was exactly as I'd predicted. However, a short while later, as I off-handedly thought about the book, I found myself plagued with feelings of guilt. Sure this guilt was already there to begin with, the story just served as a reminder and brought it to the surface.
The story centres around a small town in England that begins to experience strange occurances of "the plant kind". An unusually warm, sunny, yet wet and humid summer causes plants to grow abnormally giant and finds people in the town dying under creepy circumstances. There are people in the town who have "communication" with the plants, and a BBC television host discovers that the plants are trying to communicate with humankind regarding the fate of the earth and our abuse of nature. I don't want to spoil the plot for you or anything but I think you can guess that eventually the humans figure it all out, the plant people do their thing, the day is saved, humankind is spared a horrible fate, the end.
Recently I had a spider plant that was doing poorly and since I already have more spider plants than I know what to do with, I got rid of it. This caused me endless amounts of guilt, which this story brought to the forefront of my brain.
If you happen to find this book in a second hand store and it only costs a few cents, and you need some bad science fiction to read while sitting on the toilet, and you don’t have feelings of guilt regarding personal ill treatment of a plant, then buy it. It has a good moral lesson, but super cheesy plot line. I’m not doubting the probability of plant communication. In fact I'm very open-minded about the idea that plants can communicate with each other in a way that we just can't understand. However I doubt that it might occur as outlined in this particular book.
-GS
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