#helliconia

As promised, this week is fantasy book week, and you get three for the price of one as it’s a trilogy – Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss.

The British author, Brian Aldiss is probably not an author many people have heard of unless you are very keen on science fiction and of a certain age, despite having won a number of accolades including  an OBE, two Hugo’s and a Nebula. But, you probably will have heard of Steven Speilberg’s film “A I Artificial Intelligence”, which was based on his short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long”.

The Helliconia Trilogy is a series of books that could easily become the next big TV series and I really wish it would be picked up by a serious production company but until then I’ll just have to make do with reading the books over and over again. Yes, I have read them all many times over and each time I find something new in them.

The action takes place on the eponymous planet Helliconia, a planet with an extreme elliptical orbit around a binary star that causes its seasons to be very long and very extreme. This planet is inhabited by humans and another intelligent species – the Phagors (Ancipitals), a rather Minotaurean species. There is also a host of weird and wonderful creatures to be found there too, all described with such perfect style that you are drawn into the world and see it clearly.The first book starts just as the long, bitter winter is ending. Changes begin to take place in the flora and fauna, and also within the people themselves. Right from the start, we are introduced to the Phagors and realize the threat. The conflict between the two sentient species is constant and in the extreme climate life for human beings is cruel, violent and short.

(This is a Hurloon Minotaur from Magic:the Gathering, but it’s what I imagine a Phagor to look like)

This trilogy is not only about conflict and battles, though. Its strength lies in its detail and this is what draws the reader back again and again. The meticulous organization of the political and religious systems, the slow but inexorable changes brought about by the changing position of the planet, the micro and macro-biology, it’s all described with such scope of imagination that it is truly wonderful. Again, Wikipedia describes the books in detail but beware – lots of spoilers there if you do take up my suggestion and read the books.

Helliconia Spring was written in 1982 so anyone interested should be able to pick up cheap copy from Amazon and I can assure you it will be worth it. Read it and allow yourself to be transported to a world so alien, so different from our own. Allow yourself to fear the Phagors, to search for the fabled Oldorando, to push the Great Wheel.

You may have heard of a game called Helliconia which is loosly based on the books. I haven’t played it but it would seem that “loosely” is the operative term. Please read the books first.

Helliconia Spring is bafflingly paced, skips over the most interesting events in the life of the most interesting character it introduces, barely gives any depth to most of the other characters, and ends with the entire landscape in which the last two-thirds of the book was set being transformed to mark the turning of Winter to Spring - and then the novel ends before we even get a chance for the surviving characters to engage with that at all. Anticlimax is all well and good but at a certain point refusing to give anyone anything resembling a narrative arc just turns it into a chronicle of some stuff that happened.