Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [2]
A couple of things can be picked out from this vast tapestry. The first, as I suggested above, is the idea of struggle. Helliconia is the very opposite of an abstract book because it’s so rooted in personal stories. There’s always the sense that what’s most valuable about human society is potentially at risk and needs to be fought for. The second is self-knowledge. It’s always significant in Aldiss’ work when someone knows, or becomes aware of, their place in the universe. So the dialogue between science and religion, as for instance between the king and CaraBansity in Chapter II of Helliconia Summer, is especially important. The third is how images of cyclical change recur throughout the work, from the quotations by Lucretius that start the first and third books to the waves climbing and retreating from the shore at the start of the second.
Helliconia is so rich with invention that I could easily spend ten times as long as this introduction discussing it. One final image, though, is how often the human story we’re shown argues against the environment it’s in. At the very end of the sequence, Luterin feels ‘exhilaration’ even though the vast winter is closing in; so even though the wind smothers his shouts, we know that spring will come again.
Graham Sleight
PREFACE
A publisher friend was trying to persuade me to produce a book I did not greatly wish to write. Trying to get out of it, I wrote him a letter suggesting something slightly different. What I had in mind was a planet much like Earth, but with a longer year. I wanted no truck with our puny 365 days.
‘Let’s say this planet is called Helliconia,’ I wrote, on the spur of the moment.
The word was out. Helliconia! And from that word grew this book.
Science of recent years has become full of amazing concepts. Rivalling SF! We are now conversant with furious processes very distant from our solar system in both time and space. Cosmologists, talking of some new development, will often say, ‘It sounds like science fiction.’ A perfectly just remark, reflecting as it does the relationship that exists between science fiction and science.
This relationship is not capable of precise definition, since science permeates our lives, and both scientists and writers are wayward people. It is a shifting relationship. What is clear is that science fiction functions in predictive or descriptive mode. It can attempt either to stay ahead of science, to foresee future developments or discontinuities; or it can dramatise newly achieved developments, making the bare (and, to some, arid) facts of science accessible to a wide readership.
An example of the former method (the ‘Wait and See’ method) is Gregory Benford’s novel, Timescape, in which he talks of the intricacies of time in a way which has only recently entered discussion by the scientific community.
An example of the latter method (the ‘Digestive Tract’ method) is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, in which he demonstrates, as it were, the possibility of solar death – a startlingly new idea when Wells wrote.
In Helliconia, the Digestive Tract method is employed. In 1979, while this book was a mere building site, its foundations open to the alien sky, James Lovelock published a small book entitled Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The name Gaia was suggested by Lovelock’s friend (I might even claim him as a friend