Heliconia trilogy book brian aldiss biography

This I tell you all. The cities have spread the poison. (Winter brought with it our first sight of Aldiss’s detailed map of Helliconian towns and geographical features, something that would have been useful when reading the sprawling narrative of Summer.

Phagors and humans alternate as rulers of the planet; the same virus causes anorexia in the spring and bulimia in the autumn; characters rise to dominance and are laid low; friends become enemies, and enemies friends; new knowledge is a joy, and then a danger; religion is a comfort, and then a betrayal. I won’t try to compare it against another great series, Dune, as it is completely different, but I will say I enjoyed this tremendously and as much as the aforementioned.

Most of them entered into the game of Helliconia readily, and had fruitful suggestions to make. And these people would be shown in contrast to the gigantic background of their planet at periods when both the climate and history were undergoing change.

From the start, it was apparent that my characters were going to suffer vicissitudes even greater than those in my previous novels.

A word on each species:

Humans, sort of
Unlike humans on Earth where you are either alive or dead, on Helliconia, once humans leave their bodies, they descend into a pitch-black realm to become first gossies and then with the passage of more time, fessups.

There were two areas of scientific discovery in particular which brought interesting news.

Our sun is believed* to have a companion, dubbed Nemesis, which at its nearest comes within half a light year of Earth. He edited many successful anthologies and published groundbreaking nonfiction, including a magisterial history of science fiction ( Billion Year Spree, later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree).

Everywhere, everyone was writing fantasy; novels abounded in which the hero or the hero with his miscellaneous gang is impossibly heroic, where what prevails is an air of general implausibility or, to give implausibility its euphemistic name, magic. But most of it was my own devising, and I allowed myself to surprise my self day by day.

Eventually I got, with some astonishment, to where I intended.

Every week Helliconia undergoes a further winter thaw. Instead, they sit as passive observers in their technological cocoon, which Aldiss teasingly names Avernus—a reference to one of the gateways to Hell in Roman mythology. Even my earliest novels, such as Non-Stop, Hothouse, and the chronicle-novel (as its first publishers called it) Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, have reflected my concern for the paradox that mankind, a part of nature, has seen itself apart from nature, opposed to nature.

Separated from that entity, humans, being more complex than elephants and daisies, have little chance of flourishing.

Indeed, Aldiss offers us something very close to New Age Gaianism—a spiritual interpretation of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis.