Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [4]
Naturally, I had to find a story. Three stories, in fact.
There I already had general ideas, once I realised that I desired to assemble a large cast of characters.
What I could not grasp to begin with was what the Helliconian vegetation would look like.
I was stuck. My three most able advisers, Tom Shippey, Iain Nicholson, and Peter Cattermole, had done their best to drum philological and cosmological facts into my head. Still I could not think what a tree on Helliconia would look like. If I could not imagine a tree, I told myself, I was incapable of painting the whole new binary system I – we – had devised.
One evening in 1980, I was travelling from Oxford to London by train, to attend some function or other at the British Council. The time was towards sunset as the train passed Didcot power station. My wife and I had often talked about the station’s cooling towers; were they not, from a distance at least, beautiful? Wasn’t the industrial landscape beautiful? Would John Keats have found such sights ‘a joy for ever’?
The towers on this occasion stood with the sun low behind them. They breathed forth immense clouds of steam into the still-bright sky. Towers and steam were a unity, black against the light background.
Yes! They were Helliconian trees!
The cooling towers, those cylinders with their corseted Victorian waists, were the trunks. The billowing ragged forms of steam were the foliage. The foliage would emerge from the trunk only at certain times of year.
That moment of revelation was what I needed. I started to write my scientific romance. Among the many characters with whom I became involved, I felt most affection for Shay Tal, who stands her ground at Fish Lake; the lovely summer queen, MyrdemInggala; young Luterin; and especially Ice Captain Muntras, who plies a trade once fashionable on Earth in the days before refrigerators, selling what is sometimes prized, sometimes cursed.
As the whole matter had seemed to unfold from that one word, Helliconia, so we believe the whole universe has unfolded from the primal atom. The principle is similar. It is also contained emblematically in the second book of this novel. A defeated general walks through a Randonan forest, a great rain forest swarming with life, a seemingly permanent thing. Yet, only a few generations earlier, it all burst out of a handful of nuts.
When the third and final volume was published, my enthusiastic publisher, Tom Maschler, asked me over a drink, ‘What would you say Helliconia’s really all about?’
I shrugged. ‘A change in the weather …,’ I said.
Most so-called contemporary novels are freighted with nostalgia. Perhaps one reason for either loving or shunning science fiction is that it is relatively free of the poisons of forever looking back. It looks to the future, even when it looks with foreboding.
Science fiction has a remarkable and expanding history this century. It has diversified from cheap paperbacks and magazines to all forms of culture, whether acknowledged or otherwise, from pop to grand opera. It is a curious fact that a large proportion of SF takes place off-Earth, sometimes very far off. One day, a cunning critic will explicate these mysteries.
Meanwhile, here is another story, taking place a thousand light years from Earth. But less far from its concerns.
For this first one-volume edition, I have added appendices. They contain some of the stage directions, as it were, of the drama. The drama can be read and, we hope, enjoyed without them; the appendices form something of a separate entertainment.
Brian W. Aldiss
1996
My dear Clive,
In my previous novel LIFE IN THE WEST, I sought to depict something of the malaise sweeping the world,