Customer Reviews

Helliconia Spring: The First Book in the Helliconia Trilogy (Helliconia Trilogy, Book 1)

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The fact that this series is not in print is almost criminal, probably because Aldiss is British or something. But for those who haven't heard of perhaps the greatest science-fiction series ever to be written, the Heliconnia series was Aldiss' attempt at a world building on the scale of Dune, but at the same time using it to make a commentary on his feelings about current society. Lofty goals but the beauty of it is that it never feels like he's overextending himself, everything feels natural and the book never deviates from Aldiss' calm, almost Arthur Clarke like narration, though his use of metaphor is much better than the more hard science oriented Clarke. For those coming in late, Aldiss envisioned Heliconnia as a Earth like planet with one big difference, really really really long seasons. The planet takes about 2500 years to orbit so each generation effectively notices only one season. In the first book he shows the end of winter and the reawakening of civilization, a cycle that has gone by many times without anyone realizing it. In the beginning the book is almost standard Tolkein stuff, fantasy but just when you think that Aldiss has gone into sword and sorcery, it throws in a bit with Earth having set up an orbiting space station to watch the planet, reminding you that above all this is a science-fiction story. If you can find even one book of this series used, snap it up as fast as you can, or just swamp a publisher with requests to put it back into print. Like Moorcock's Cornelius series, this is one that deserves to be out there for everyone to read.

In this first book of the Helliconia trilogy, Brian Aldiss has created what appears to be a Dune-like epic taking place over many centuries. It certainly is a creative concept. - an Earth-like world with a long orbit in a binary star system, with an extremely long revolution and seasons that last for centuries. Here the "people" of Helliconia have lived a hard life in winter conditions, much like the Neanderthals or Eskimos, and believed that the world had always been that way. But springtime slowly begins in this book, and the people become more cultured and learned with the easier life, but also less healthy and vigilant. This obviously represents the transition in the real world from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from the dark ages to the renaissance.

These grand concepts are definitely robust, but at the more immediate levels of plotline and character development, Aldiss delivers little more than a very typical fantasy/adventure yarn with a little bit of sci-fi mixed in. There are some creative settings and weird features like animals that are born by eating their way out of their parents, and trees that grow underground during the winter then literally explode into the spring. But these are undermined by a very predictable tale of epic journeys, strange creatures, and complex but courageous leaders, straight from a million fantasy novels. Also Aldiss has a very - shall we say - "outdated" conception of the female characters. The worst aspect of this novel is something that really looks like a tacked-on afterthought. It turns out that Helliconia is being observed by a team of Earth scientists who ludicrously have been hanging around the planet for centuries and making very quiet analyses of this primitive world. This seems like merely a convenient way for Aldiss to provide a detached narrator to the story, and the Earth scientists' presence is hard to take seriously. This first book ends predictably with little to make you running to the following books in the trilogy. The Helliconia tale tries to be a vast epic but turns out to be small in scope.

I finally bought this trilogy second-hand (as it is no longer in print in Australia) after noticing the enticing cover art of the 80's versions many times in used book stores. Have you heard the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover"? It applies here.

The general premise of the trilogy is interesting - Helliconia, a distant planet circling a binary star sytem is discovered by Earth-humans who set up a satellite space station to observe the day to day life of Helliconia's 'human' and Phagor inhabitants. The lifestyle of the Helliconian's is determined by the season in which their generation lives in, and the trilogy begins at the end of a 3000 year winter, where Phagors are dominant and humans subjective to them.

Despite this unique idea, the trilogy falls down in story-telling. The plot for "Spring" is weak, but improves in "Summer" and "Winter", and the characterisation is average - especially the female characters. Having said this, there is some thought-provoking commentary on our nature: in particular, sociology; conservation; religion; and warfare.

The Helliconia Trilogy has been compared to Dune by other reviewers, but I think this is unfair on Aldiss. The purpose of the series is not just to create a new world, but to provide us with an insight into human nature by comparing us to our contempories on this new world (which is not Frank Herbert's purpose in Dune). Accept each book for what it is.

Do I recommend the trilogy? Probably not. Why? I was hurrying to get through it. I found the commentary a bit trying towards the end of each book (it also interrupted the flow of the story) and so I started skipping through it without thinking, endeavouring to continue with the storyline - which wasn't very impressive.

Yuli is a child of a hunter-gatherer family living under the light of two suns on the northern plains of Campannlat on the frigid, ice-wrapped planet of Helliconia. When his father is enslaved by the vicious phagors, Yuli is left alone. He finds his way to the subterranean city of Pannoval, where he prospers as a member of the priesthood. Tiring of torturing heretics and punishing renegades, he elects to flee the oppressive city with some like-minded allies, eventually founding the settlement of Oldorando some distance away.

Fifty years later, Yuli's descendants have conquered a larger town, renaming it Oldorando as well, and are prospering. Game is becoming more plentiful, the river is thawing and warmer winds are rising, even as the smaller sun, Freyr, grows larger in the sky. But with peace and plenty comes indolence and corruption, and the people of Oldorando find themselves bickering and feuding for power, even as a great crusade of phagors leaves their icy homes in the eastern mountains on a quest to slaughter as many humans as possible.

The great drama of life on Helliconia is observed from an orbiting Earth space station, the Avernus, the crew of which watch as Helliconia and its sun, Batalix, draw closer to the great white supergiant about which they revolve and the centuries-long winter comes to a violent end.

Helliconia Spring (originally published in 1982) is the first volume in Brian Aldiss' masterpiece, The Helliconia Trilogy. In this work, Aldiss has constructed the supreme achievement of science fiction worldbuilding: Helliconia, a planet located in a binary star system a thousand light-years distant from Earth. Batalix and Helliconia take 2,592 years to orbit Freyr in a highly elliptical orbit (Helliconia is three times further from Freyr at its most distant point than nearest), which results in seasons that last for centuries apiece. Helliconia's plants, animal and sentient lifeforms have all biologically adapted to this unusual arrangement (in a manner that prevents colonisation by Earthlings, who would be killed quickly by the planet's bacteria), but its civilisations have not adapted satisfactorily: humanity rises in the spring and becomes dominant in the summer before being toppled by the phagors in the autumn and enslaved in the winter. However, more evidence has survived of the previous cycle than normal, and this time around those humans who have discovered the truth have vowed to ensure that humanity will survive the next Great Winter triumphant over its ancestral enemy.

Helliconia Spring is a complex novel working on a literal storytelling level - the factional battles for control over Oldorando and Pannoval, the phagor crusade flooding across the continent and the search for truth and understanding of the Helliconian star system by Oldorando's scientists - and also on thematic ones, with Aldiss examining the struggles between religion and science, between those who thrive in peace and those who thrive in war and the duality of winter and summer, humanity and phagor, and though the religious ritual of pauk, between the living and the dead.

Having the orbital Earth platform is a good idea, as it gives us a literal scientific understanding of the Helliconia system which those on the surface are struggling to understand, even if it does feel a little removed from the storyline at this time. Amongst other criticisms are a lack of character closure: whilst the grand history of Helliconia and the thematic elements continue to be explored in Helliconia Summer, the story itself moves on several hundred years, leaving the main characters of this book long dead. But these are outweighed by the strengths: the effective and impressive prose, the fantastic descriptions of a near-frozen planet thawing into life with its millions of species of plant and animal life waking up under the two suns and the impressive melding of cold, impersonal scientific worldbuilding with a satisfying plot and vividly-described characters.

Helliconia Spring (*****) is a masterpiece of science fiction and features the single most impressive work of SF worldbuilding to date. The novel is available now in the USA. A new omnibus edition of the entire trilogy will be published by Gollancz as part of the SF Masterworks collection on 12 August 2010.

This is the first book in the Helliconia series. When I first tried to read it, I lost interest in the first chapter and put the books aside. A decade later, I took it up again and forced myself to read past that. It does get better, but it's never better than so-so.

The story is of the recovery of civilization as the Helliconia system moves into the Spring of it's long cycle around a companion binary star (Freyr). The idea is interesting but the execution is awkward. Aldiss has the equivalent of a small village produce more science than the equivalent of Newton and Einstein. They domesticate the horse, reinvent agriculture, and work out all the details of astronomy in one generation. This is par for the course in science fiction, but implausible to say the least.

Aldiss's writing is OK to good, and his characterization adequate, but the novel itself just isn't that interesting. Part of the problem is that you never identify with a particular character enough to really care a lot about his or her motivations.

It was enough to keep me reading the series (which I'd already bought), but only just.

Aldiss has created a very interesting world but there is not much of a plot in this first book. The book seems to be a setup for the subsequent books in the series which I have not read yet.

The book is mostly about how the humans on Helliconia cope with the severe change to their environment as Helliconia moves out of its long cold winter into spring. Due to a simultaneous change in leadership, they are challenged to adjust socially and economically in order to survive. They are threatened within by their own internal petty politics and without by the aboriginal Phagors who have always hate humans and by other humans who are their sworn enemies and wish to kill or enslave them. They must deal with a new age of enlightment which is at odds with their traditional ways of thinking. Blindly following their religion is questioned. On top of all this, they also must deal with a devastating plague that threatens to wipe them from the face of Helliconia.

All this is watched by a group of anthropologists from old Earth who do not interfere. The assumption is that this is an old Earth colony which has fallen back to the stone age due to Helliconia's severe winter thousands of years ago. These watchers add some clarification to what is going on on Helliconia. Whether they play any significant role remains to be seen.

The span of years encompassed by the first book in the Helliconia trilogy is huge, the concept of Helliconia infinite. I've only read the first book, and I can't wait to read Summer. Spring was well written, even visionary, and I read it non-stop for two days until I turned the last page.

The generation gap between the two sections of Spring was at first troubling. I normally like to follow a character all the way through, but the scope of this series is too big for one protagonist to fulfill. It's the story of a world, and a culture, embroiled in perpetual combat with an enemy species--an alien species paramount in the Spring.

I was reminded of those films in school showing a flower blooming with time-lapse photography. I could almost see humanity blooming as Spring advanced. Each snapshot through the years featured a blossoming human ascendency over the evil Phagors. There was also a troubling, and for me, unresolved question about the voyeuristic watchers from Earth. What part do they play in this saga?

What happens as the season roll towards winter again?

An interesting, but ultimately not very satisfying, series. Aldiss seems to have conceived the series as a chance to say some things about religion, and to make up an entire other planetary system with unusual weather effects and evolutionary adaptations. He didn't seem to realize until the second book that he also needed characterization and an interesting plot, and then he doesn't do a great job. There are some insightful or suspenseful or beautiful parts, but there is a lot of senseless rape and violence, not for shock value (the few sex scenes are more boring than anything else), but seemingly as part of his philosophy about the nature of mankind. Towards the end he throws in some stuff about the dangers of technology that seems completely out of place. Read it if you have nothing else to do, but keep a dictionary nearby for when he throws in seriously obscure words, and don't expect to be able to pronounce many of the names.

This book (as well as the rest of trilogy)is about passing of time and how real events turn into myths and later legends/religion. It's about changing ecology, language and astrophysics of double star system. But it's mostly about development and decline of Human and Phagor civilizations.

It contains plot and real characters but separated by centuries and profound changes in ecology of Helliconia.

The idea of the world is a very interesting stage but the actual story being told isn't much of a story. The following books aren't much better, skip this series.