Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [3]
How is it that the Earth’s temperature has not long ago increased, as has happened on ‘our sister planet’ Venus; that the salinity of the oceans has not become more toxic than the Dead Sea; that atmospheric oxygen has not become tied down in oxides, or that hydrogen has not escaped from the upper atmosphere? Lovelock’s answer, known as the Gaia Hypothesis, is that everything on the earth, the biomass, constitutes a single self-regulatory entity – living, of course, but of course without conscious intention. Gaia has no particular centre, no prime minister or parliament, no Führer; not even a Greek goddess; it functions through its unfocused complexity, built up over millions of years. The implication is that the work of bacterial and other forces has built, and maintains, the living world we know, best to suit themselves – a process in which humanity has played small part.
I gave myself up to James Lovelock’s arguments in his first book and succeeding ones in the way that, in an earlier phase of existence, I had surrendered myself to Thomas Hardy’s novels.
Interestingly, Lovelock is an independent biologist of a rather old-fashioned kind, unsupported by universities or other institutions. And his hypothesis relies on the mode of close observation and enquiry which is such a marked feature of Charles Darwin’s work. Darwin perceived where we merely see. Lovelock points out that what he calls ‘city wisdom’ has become almost entirely centred on problems of human relationships; whereas, in a natural tribal group, wisdom means giving due weight to relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world.
He says, ‘I speak from personal experience when I say that those of us who go forth in ships to travel to remote places … are few in number compared with those who chose to work in city-based institutions and universities.’
From travel, investigation, and perception, Lovelock built up his integrative hypothesis. I was wildly excited by it. Whether it was true or not, I felt that it was just and should be proved by research, and that here was a thesis which delivered new understanding. Lovelock wrote during the period of the Cold War, when we lived in the shadow of nuclear war, and the threat of nuclear destruction, followed by nuclear winter. Had nuclear winter come about, it would have been the ultimate profaning of nature, the rape and slaughter of Gaia.
These intellectual and emotional ideas were in my mind when I sat down to the seven-year task of writing Helliconia. I hoped in it to dramatise on a wide scale the workings out of Lovelock’s hypothesis.
The story between these covers is just a scientific romance. It talks about pretty ordinary fallible people living within fallible systems, just like us – together with the alien who also has a share in us. Although it may not look like it, I did not intend to place a great scientific emphasis on this introduction. SF, that spectral entity, is not science but fiction, bound to obey many of fiction’s ordinary rules, possibly with an extra imaginative dimension – there is no proof whatsoever that life exists elsewhere in the galaxy.
Deeply interested in the workings of the world of affairs, of economics and ideology and religion, I had written a novel (Life in the West) concerning such matters, of which I was merely a bystander. The novel met with enough success for me to hope to do something similar on a larger scale.
So at first I thought of an allegory, with the three major power blocs represented by three Helliconian continents. Happily, this scheme soon faded away – although three continents were left behind by the tide, Campannlat, Hespagorat, and Sibornal.
For by then