Helliconia

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The premise of Helliconia can be set out in a sentence, but it takes hundreds of pages to understand fully what it means. The planet Helliconia is locked into an orbit around two stars that gives it a ‘great year’ equivalent to 2,592 of ours. The three volumes making up the trilogy — originally published as Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983), and Helliconia Winter (1985) — chart this cycle. As the planet warms, the human-like inhabitants gain ascendancy over the savage phagors, but this pattern is reversed as the great year turns back to winter.

Helliconia is not the last science fiction work by Brian Aldiss — he has had 25 years of productive writing since it was published — but it’s easy to see it as a capstone for his work. It certainly embodies ideas he was working out in earlier books like Non-Stop (1958) and Hothouse (1962). They were concerned with how humanity discovers, or fails to discover, its place in a universe shaped by forces out of its control. In those books, knowledge of the true situation isn’t especially consoling, but there’s still great value attached to applying rationality to the world.

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