Helliconia: Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter Read online

  ‘Our ablest SF writer’

  Guardian

  ‘Propels the reader headlong into marvel. A trilogy which has acquired monumental nobility’

  The Times

  ‘Science fiction has never before had this grandeur’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Brian Aldiss’ towering imagination places his Helliconia trilogy far above standard science fiction’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Rarely has someone else’s brave new world been brought so stunningly to life’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘One of the best SF writers Britain has ever produced’

  Iain M. Banks

  ‘A marvellous journey to another world – a remarkable feat of the imagination’

  John Fowles

  Also by Brian Aldiss

  NOVELS

  The Brightfount Diaries (1955)

  Non-Stop (1958)

  Bow Down to Nul (1960)

  The Primal Urge (1961)

  The Male Response (1961)

  Hothouse (1962)

  The Dark Light Years (1964)

  Greybeard (1964)

  Earthworks (1965)

  An Age (1967)

  Report on Probability A (1968)

  Barefoot in the Head: A European Fantasia (1969)

  The Hand-Reared Boy (1970)

  A Soldier Erect (1971)

  Frankenstein Unbound (1973)

  The Eighty Minute Hour: A Space Opera (1974)

  The Malacia Tapestry (1976)

  Brothers of the Head (1977)

  A Rude Awakening (1978)

  Enemies of the System: A Tale of Homo Uniformis (1978)

  Moreau’s Other Island (1980)

  Life in the West (1980)

  Helliconia Spring (1982)

  Helliconia Summer (1983)

  Helliconia Winter (1985)

  The Year Before Yesterday (1987)

  Ruins (1987)

  Forgotten Life (1988)

  Dracula Unbound (1991)

  Remembrance Day (1993)

  Somewhere East of Life (1994)

  White Mars Or, The Mind Set Free (with Roger Penrose) (1999)

  Super-State (2002)

  The Cretan Teat (2002)

  Affairs at Hampden Ferrers (2004)

  Sanity and the Lady (2005)

  Jocasta (2006)

  HARM (2007)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Space/ Time and Nathaniel (Presciences) (1957)

  No Time Like Tomorrow (1959)

  The Canopy of Time (1959)

  Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (1960)

  The Airs of Earth (1963)

  Best Science Fiction Stories of Brian W. Aldiss (1965)

  The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths (1966)

  Intangible Inc. (1969)

  The Moment of Eclipse (1970)

  The Book of Brian Aldiss (1972)

  Last Orders and Other Stories (1977)

  New Arrivals, Old Encounters (1979)

  Seasons in Flight (1984)

  The Magic of the Past (1987)

  Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss (1988)

  Science Fiction Blues (1988)

  A Romance of the Equator: Best Fantasy Stories (1989)

  A Tupelov Too Far (1994)

  The Secret of This Book (1995)

  Common Clay (1996)

  Super-Toys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time (2001)

  Cultural Breaks (2005)

  NON FICTION

  The Shape of Further Things (1970)

  Billion Year Spree (1973)

  Science Fiction Art (1975)

  Science Fiction Art (1976)

  Science Fiction as Science Fiction (1978)

  The World and Nearer Ones (1979)

  The Pale Shadow of Science (1985)

  … And the Lurid Glare of the Comet (1986)

  Trillion Year Spree (1986)

  Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life (1990)

  The Detached Retina (1995)

  The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman (1998)

  When the Feast is Finished (with Margaret Aldiss) (1999)

  Art after Apogee: The Relationships between an Idea, a Story, a Painting (with Rosemary Phipps) (2000)

  Helliconia

  Helliconia Spring

  Helliconia Summer

  Helliconia Winter

  BRIAN ALDISS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Praise

  Also by Brian Aldiss

  Map

  Introduction by Graham Sleight

  Preface by Brian Aldiss

  Helliconia Spring

  Prelude: Yuli

  Embruddock

  Chapter I: Death of a Grandfather

  Chapter II: The Past That Was Like a Dream

  Chapter III: A Leap from the Tower

  Chapter IV: Favourable Temperature Gradients

  Chapter V: Double Sunset

  Chapter VI: ‘When I Were All Befuddock …’

  Chapter VII: A Cold Welcome for Phagors

  Chapter VIII: In Obsidian

  Chapter IX: In and Out of a Hoxney Skin

  Chapter X: Laintal Ay’s Achievement

  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
r />   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 Olaf Stapledon. They too valued empirical investigation even as they warned about its limits and dangers. The scientific romance tends to use the viewpoint of a detached observer rather than a participant in the events described – think of the traveller in The Time Machine or the disembodied narrator of Star Maker. Yet Aldiss has always been interested too in individual humans and their struggles. In Helliconia, the detached viewpoint is provided by the Earth space station Avernus, orbiting Helliconia and relaying its events back to our solar system. But what occupies the bulk of these books is the story of people like Yuli or Luterin and their efforts to fight for or preserve what seems most precious to them.

  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 of mine) William Golding, the novelist. The classical Gaia was the goddess of the Earth in Greek mythology; Lovelock was outlining an impersonal updated version of that gubernatory personage. Lovelock pointed out that the continued survival of a living Earth is miraculous. Life survives despite an amazingly narrow range of chemical and physical parameters – parameters subject to fluctuation.

  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.’