Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017)

An astonishing trilogy, best read, I suspect, in one big 1,000-plus paged lump as presented here. Helliconia is a formidable work. The timescale is vast, the themes are difficult, the human dramas, though full of intrigue and passion, battles and spectacle, are unashamedly literary in the demands placed on the reader. The trilogy, in fact, expects full intellectual and emotional engagement in order to fully appreciate the scale and complexity of Aldiss' achievement.

Helliconia is a planet show more with two suns and two years. The shorter years are over four hundred days long. The greater year takes milllenia. At one end of the great year the planet is shrouded in extreme cold, at the other in extreme heat. Civilisations rise and fall over the course of the year, only for the survivors to come forth again in the Spring and start all over again. Helliconia is an epic of climate change.

Vying for supremacy on the planet are two species, the phagor, who dominate in the cold time, and humans who dominate in the warmth. The two are profoundly hostile to each other, and yet fundamentally linked in the struggle to survive. Overhead is a research station from Earth, the Avernus, cataloguing and recording and transmitting its findings home.

Life persists, in abundant forms and varieties, though the processes are cruel and profligate with individuals, but the books chart the stories of individuals as they struggle with their strange world, trying to understand it or shape it or control it, often with plenty of cruelty of their own. Can the cycle be broken? Can memory and civilisation persist, and if so at what price?

The worlbuilding's the thing here. Designed, envisioned and delineated with great care and detail, Helliconia is alive on the page, but though marvelous and splendid and strange, it's more than a simple vehicle for escapist fantasy. It's a world in some ways even more circumscribed than our own, partly because of the strictures of the environment and partly because of humanity itself. It's a big, broad, shambling masterpiece. Every human is flawed, every venture doomed and the vast natural processes designed to preserve life are merciless and inscrutable, yet ultimately Aldiss unifies these elements into a vision of universal empathy in which intelligent life must adapt to to the natural vehicles that keep it alive. show less

Mumanity's arrogant first contact with the peaceful, intelligent, but physically repulsive Utods, alien beings who wallow in their own excrement as a spiritual and biological necessity, leading humans to mistake them for animals and slaughter them, highlighting themes of xenophobia, cultural misunderstanding, and the narrow definition of "civilization". A few surviving Utods are brought back to Earth, but their true nature and advanced culture, so alien to human concepts of hygiene, remain show more misunderstood until one human explorer, Bruce Ainson, begins to grasp their alien wisdom. show less

A generational starship which has lost it's way/purpose is hardly new ground in sci-fi but Aldiss gives it a novel spin by adding everything from evolutionary twists and homegrown theology to conspiracy theories. The final act, while not a total shocker, still managed to provide a couple of surprises. I liked it!

This is the first novel in Brian Aldiss's monster trilogy; I unwittingly read the later novel Dracula Unbound first, two months ago. In this one it is 2020 (the book was published in 1973, when that was still the fairly far future), when increasing stability in the space time continuum is causing timeslips, one of which sends Joseph Bodenland back to 1816 Switzerland. He meets Mary Shelley, plus Percy and Lord Byron, during the summer the former wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. There are show more some great scenes where Bodenland interacts with these literary giants, revelling in their speculative thinking, way ahead of its time, but very unrealistically idealistic from a 21st century view point. However, time is more mixed up than he thinks - in this version of 1816, while Mary Shelley still wrote Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is also a real person who created a real monster, and its female partner, which Bodenland pledges to hunt down, to prevent what he sees as the impact of Frankenstein's amoral scientific endeavour on his own present day situation. The novel is thus a perhaps slightly awkward amalgam of literary homage, Gothic horror and thriller chase. I found the ending slightly unsatisfactory. show less