Customer Reviews

Helliconia Trilogy

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Helliconia is a place I can almost SEE through the pages in my book. You begin to genuinely feel for the characters, as the storyline unfolds, we watch the main characters from above, often they lived hundreds of years apart: the Spring with makind living underground worshipping a mountain god & praying for the return of Freyr (the second sun) Summer & the emergence of Mankind's nations across the globe; the slow sink of mankind into barbarism in Winter as helliconia slides into another 500 year long freeze. The most complete & absorbing series of books I have ever read. It MUST return to print...please. A true classic to rival Tolkien and surpasses the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson

This series is a masterpiece. Buy it (if you can) and set aside enough time to read it. It's worth every minute. The 'plague' referred to in a previous review is the biological mechanism that allows the human inhabitants of the planet to survive the massive temperature extremes that occur over the 'year' (1000 earth years). The temperature ranges from sub-sub arctic to ultra-tropical and the physical changes as the people go from short fat and conservative Winter people to tall thin active Summer people are described with marvellous detail.

The story of the humans and their interaction with the natives of the planet is interwoven with the technical information with a masterful flair.

This series is similar in breadth and vision to the Eden series by Harry Harrison, so if you enjoy one, you will love the other.

One word keeps popping up in these reviews: CRIMINAL. That is, the fact that this is currently unavailable. This is a must-read for SF fans and a must-study for would be writers of SF but be forewarned: if you are of the second persuasion this will scare the words out of you, unless you are as gifted as this man (or very cocky). Read them all, read them in order for the delicious discovery, the slow-revealing of mysteries. Images from these stories will haunt you ever after.

Superb! Captivating, subtle, forceful, multi-dimensional.
UNBELIEVABLE!! Why is this trilogy so hard to get in one volume in the US? (you can get the one volume in Europe), but, really, they should all be read together. Beyond anything ordinary. Listing separate elements (Wutra worm, phagors, etc.) does not even begin to describe the impact of these books. Highly recommend to anyone who has any imagination/curiosity whatsoever

The Helliconia Trilogy is "must" reading for any Fantasy/Sci-fi buff. The planet Hellicon has a bizarre orbit that causes wild shifts in climate.....this, along with a devastating plague that wipes out most of the population twice every centuries-long Helliconian year....results in the loss of historic data and technology. The survivors must repeatedly " start from scratch ". All this drama is relayed to Earth from an orbiting spacestation and viewed in special theaters........Heros, cowards, romance.......so real you can taste it

Yes, it really did take me two months, but I don't mean I didn't enjoy it - it's just very, very long and heavy enough so that you can't do more than 30-40 pages a day. This heaviness is maybe the greatest fault of this saga, but there's a lot of good in it too, starting with the very interesting basic idea. And even though you get the feeling that Aldiss only scrapes the surface of the world he has created, in the end he sums up the whole magnificent range of time pretty nicely. It's not every day you see a novel which covers a... well, was it 1000 our years? I can't remember anymore, after all this time.

More importantly, Helliconia is not only about great and big things, Aldiss pays much concern to single people and their lives. In fact, each section is an exploration of one person, and since those persons are psychologically very believable, they are most certainly worth the attention. Helliconia doesn't even lack humour, against all probabilities. If massive epics are your trade, go and get it. But friends of neat 150-page novels can save their money for something else: this one really takes time.