Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [1]
Chapter XI: When Shay Tal Went
Chapter XII: Lord of the Island
Chapter XIII: View from a Half Roon
Chapter XIV: Through the Eye of a Needle
Chapter XV: The Stench of Burning
Helliconia Summer
Chapter I: The Seacoast of Borlien
Chapter II: Some Arrivals at the Palace
Chapter III: A Premature Divorce
Chapter IV: An Innovation in the Cosgatt
Chapter V: The Way of the Madis
Chapter VI: Diplomats Bearing Gifts
Chapter VII: The Queen Visits the Living and the Dead
Chapter VIII: In the Presence of Mythology
Chapter IX: Some Botheration for the Chancellor
Chapter X: Billy Changes Custody
Chapter XI: Journey to the Northern Continent
Chapter XII: The Downstream Passenger Trade
Chapter XIII: A Way to Better Weaponry
Chapter XIV: Where Flambreg Live
Chapter XV: The Captives of the Quarry
Chapter XVI: The Man who Mined a Glacier
Chapter XVII: Death-Flight
Chapter XVIII: Visitors from the Deep
Chapter XIX: Oldorando
Chapter XX: How Justice Was Done
Chapter XXI: The Slaying of Akhanaba
Helliconia Winter
Prelude
Chapter I: The Last Battle
Chapter II: A Silent Presence
Chapter III: The Restrictions of Persons in Abodes Act
Chapter IV: An Army Career
Chapter V: A Few More Regulations
Chapter VI: G4PBX / 4582–4–3
Chapter VII: The Yellow-Striped Fly
Chapter VIII: The Rape of the Mother
Chapter IX: A Quiet Day Ashore
Chapter X: ‘The Dead Never Talk Politics’
Chapter XI: Stern Discipline for Travellers
Chapter XII: Kakool on the Trail
Chapter XIII: ‘An Old Antagonism’
Chapter XIV: The Greatest Crime
Chapter XV: Inside the Wheel
Chapter XVI: A Fatal Innocence
Chapter XVII: Sunset
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
Appendix 6
Acknowledgements
About the Author
SF Masterworks
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
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.
Helliconia marks something new in Aldiss’ work in the detail of its invention and the rigour with which the setting is presented. In a book like Hothouse, the flora and fauna of the garish future are described with a kind of joyous abandon. In Helliconia, there’s still the same fascination with how the world works, but a more rigorous sense of how the ecosystem fits together. Aldiss acknowledges many scientists who helped him put together the picture of Helliconia: not least is James Lovelock, whose Gaia Hypothesis proposes that the elements of the Earth’s ecosystem interact far more intricately than we might think. Helliconia’s ecosystem is certainly elaborate, and the relationships within that system – between humans and phagors, say – are gradually revealed through the story.
In his history of SF, Billion Year Spree (1973), Aldiss talks at length about his admiration for writers of the scientific romance such as H. G. Wells and