Customer Reviews

Helliconia Spring

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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.

I finally bought this trilogy second-hand (as it is no longer in print in Australia) after noticing the enticing cover art of the 80's versions many times in used book stores. Have you heard the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover"? It applies here.

The general premise of the trilogy is interesting - Helliconia, a distant planet circling a binary star sytem is discovered by Earth-humans who set up a satellite space station to observe the day to day life of Helliconia's 'human' and Phagor inhabitants. The lifestyle of the Helliconian's is determined by the season in which their generation lives in, and the trilogy begins at the end of a 3000 year winter, where Phagors are dominant and humans subjective to them.

Despite this unique idea, the trilogy falls down in story-telling. The plot for "Spring" is weak, but improves in "Summer" and "Winter", and the characterisation is average - especially the female characters. Having said this, there is some thought-provoking commentary on our nature: in particular, sociology; conservation; religion; and warfare.

The Helliconia Trilogy has been compared to Dune by other reviewers, but I think this is unfair on Aldiss. The purpose of the series is not just to create a new world, but to provide us with an insight into human nature by comparing us to our contempories on this new world (which is not Frank Herbert's purpose in Dune). Accept each book for what it is.

Do I recommend the trilogy? Probably not. Why? I was hurrying to get through it. I found the commentary a bit trying towards the end of each book (it also interrupted the flow of the story) and so I started skipping through it without thinking, endeavouring to continue with the storyline - which wasn't very impressive.

In this first book of the Helliconia trilogy, Brian Aldiss has created what appears to be a Dune-like epic taking place over many centuries. It certainly is a creative concept. - an Earth-like world with a long orbit in a binary star system, with an extremely long revolution and seasons that last for centuries. Here the "people" of Helliconia have lived a hard life in winter conditions, much like the Neanderthals or Eskimos, and believed that the world had always been that way. But springtime slowly begins in this book, and the people become more cultured and learned with the easier life, but also less healthy and vigilant. This obviously represents the transition in the real world from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from the dark ages to the renaissance.

These grand concepts are definitely robust, but at the more immediate levels of plotline and character development, Aldiss delivers little more than a very typical fantasy/adventure yarn with a little bit of sci-fi mixed in. There are some creative settings and weird features like animals that are born by eating their way out of their parents, and trees that grow underground during the winter then literally explode into the spring. But these are undermined by a very predictable tale of epic journeys, strange creatures, and complex but courageous leaders, straight from a million fantasy novels. Also Aldiss has a very - shall we say - "outdated" conception of the female characters. The worst aspect of this novel is something that really looks like a tacked-on afterthought. It turns out that Helliconia is being observed by a team of Earth scientists who ludicrously have been hanging around the planet for centuries and making very quiet analyses of this primitive world. This seems like merely a convenient way for Aldiss to provide a detached narrator to the story, and the Earth scientists' presence is hard to take seriously. This first book ends predictably with little to make you running to the following books in the trilogy. The Helliconia tale tries to be a vast epic but turns out to be small in scope.

Of course, this is not Dune. It's a series of episodes loosely bound together, with uninteresting humanoids going to and from nowhere and a cameo human observation space station. It makes one think when the most memorable character in the book is the revenge - seeking phagor. A classic? Classic books have plots.

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".