Helliconia Spring Tr

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?

This is a great book and part of a great trilogy. The proper comparison is with Gene Wolfe and not with Frank Herbert. The book is fascinating in the way it shows the multitude of effects that the environment has on societies.

It must be more than fifteen years since I first got my hands on a copy of Helliconia Spring. I read it in an afternoon. Summer and Winter were gobbled up with equal enjoyment. I go back to Helliconia every few years and row the "Great Wheel" along with the devout to "its rightful port beside Freyr".

This is an awesome book, nobody can argue with that. Everybody talks about all this emotional stuff, I don't know about that it's just a cool book for anyone who can stomach it. Read it.

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.