Helliconia - British author Brian Aldiss' superb creation, science fiction worldbuilding comparable to Frank Herbert's Dune, or, if you like, in the world of fantasy, comparable to J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.
Helliconia Spring - the first volume in the trilogy. The other two volumes are Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter.
Take a look at the below diagram. Helliconia is a planet revolving around its sun Batalix as Batalix revolves around larger sun Frayr in an elliptical orbit. The consequence of Helliconia being either closer to or more distant from Frayr results in a particular season - spring, summer, winter - lasting for centuries. This Frayr-Batalix binary sun solar system is within our Milky Way but thousands of light years away.
Survival on Helliconia centers around the Darwinian struggle for supremacy between humans and phagors. 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. All living humans can communicate with the gossies when they enter a trance state called pauk.
Phagors
Built like big, powerful professional wrestlers, phagors walk human-style on their two hind legs and speak their own language. Phagor heads are like mountain goats with two lethal horns; shaggy white fur and antifreeze-like blood make phagors impervious to the bitter cold. Phagoes fight ferociously with swords and spears; phagors take humans as slaves and some phagors ride huge horse-like beasts called kaidaws.
Climate
Alas, in many critical ways, there's a third major player in the cycles of life on Helliconia: the weather itself. Can you imagine what the planet must be like during those hundreds of years of Siberia-like subzero ice and snow? And how about those other hundreds of years when Helliconia moves closer to Fraya and the surface of the planet turns into tropical jungles and scorching deserts? Then there are those hundreds of transitional spring-like years where summer-dominating humans and winter-dominating phagors continually battle it out.
Brian Aldiss builds the world of Helliconia Sping methodically, in carefully elaborated detail over the course of 450 pages. This to say, the novel requires a bit of time and energy but once I began to immerse myself in Aldiss' creation, I gladly returned to the book again and again. As part of his worldbuilding, Aldiss explores myth and religion, anthropology and sociology, landscape and architecture, gender and class.
Helliconia Spring begins with an extensive Prelude where we follow Yuri, a young hunter from a tribe of hunters (think of Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear) as he makes his way to the city of Pannoval, a city having much in common with one of our first prehistoric cities along the banks of the Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
"He breathed deep as he got his first sight of Pannoval.
Ahead was a great cliff, so steep that no snow clung to it. In the cliff face was carved an enormous representation of Akha the Great One. Akha squatted in a traditional attitude, knees near his shoulders, arms wrapped round his knees, hands locked palms upward, with the sacred flame of life in his palms. His head was large, topped with a knot of hair. His half-human face struck terror into a beholder. There was awe even in his cheeks. Yet his great almond eyes were bland, and there was serenity as well as ferocity to be read in that upturned mouth and those majestic eyebrows.
Beside his left foot, and dwarfed by it, was an opening in the rock. Yuri saw that this mouth was itself gigantic, possibly three times taller than a man."
Yuri remains in Pannoval and even subjects himself to rigorous training in order to become one of the city's priests. But you just can't keep a hunter tribesman down - forever his own man and a lover of freedom, Yuri sickens of the whole domesticated rule-bound society and his role as priest. Along with three companions, Yuri flees the city, ventures forth across mountains and planes to establish the priest-free community of Oldorando.
The bulk of Aldiss' novel picks up 50 years later in Oldorando. Yuri is long dead but the men and women still live mostly in The Clan of the Cave Bear-style until, decades later, new discoveries and innovations transform Oldorando into a medieval-like village complete with guilds and tradespeople, new fabrics and fashions, writing and books, even an academy of science run by women.
Every week Helliconia undergoes a further winter thaw. Ah, springtime! Although one could write a short book on all the happenings, I'll simply bullet the following to serve as a taste test:
Flora and Fauna
Many species of our animals and plants are found in Helliconia, including pigs and sheep, boars and dogs, geese and blackbirds, bats, lice and mosquitoes. Additionally, a number of unique creatures roam the land such as a giant worm with wings.
Social Strata
Oldorando has its leaders and lieutenants, hunters and craftsmen, and there are also slaves, not only humans (usually captured from outlining tribes) but as the phagors take human slaves, so humans have their phagor slaves. In Oldorando, there's old Myk, a phagor that has never known freedom, a phagor taken captive by humans at birth. Among Myk's duties through the years once he reached maturity: giving human children rides on his big, broad furry back.
Space Station Observatory
Halfway through the novel, we discover there are researchers from Earth orbiting Helliconia in an enormous space station called Avernus. As much as the researchers on board would love to go down to the planet's surface, even pay a visit to Oldorando (wouldn't that be fun!), unfortunately, such a trip would be a death-sentence since our immune system could never handle deadly Helliconian microbes.
Meanwhile, Back on Planet Earth
All of the information about Helliconian life is transmitted back to Earth - including actual photos and film footage of human interaction within Oldorando and phagors riding across the planes. Universities compile encyclopedias; theaters show Helliconia feature films; computer programmers create entertaining games (natch) simulating all aspects of Helliconian life - one blockbuster: battles between humans and phagors.
The Big Picture
Of course, the prime question looms: will humans accumulate enough knowledge and recorded history so when the next cycle unfolds and Helliconian Winter turns into the next Helliconian Spring, humans can benefit from the previous spring's accomplishments. In other words, will humans learn from the past or must they begin again at Clan of the Cave Bear cultural ground zero? So exciting. I'm all set to find out in Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter. Who knows, maybe the Helliconian humans might even have some help from Earth humans. If so, then those monstrous phagors are in for a big shock.
British author Brian Aldiss, 1925-2017
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