3.5
Helliconia Summer
ByPublisher Description
The Grand Master of Science Fiction’s “monumental” epic continues as Helliconia nears its larger star—and a strange visitor joins its civilization (The Times, London).
A handful of centuries on, Helliconia is close to the larger star in its binary system, and the Phagors have been driven into exile, but conflicting religions and hostility to science keep human civilization fragmented and constantly fighting wars over petty power and fertile land as a plague devastates populations. However, everything changes when a secret visitor from the observer satellite from Earth accepts a slow death in order to visit the planet and spend his time in the sunlight and open air. More than thirty years after the original publication of Helliconia Spring, the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy, the series is newly available, now with a map, an afterword, and an introduction by the author.
A handful of centuries on, Helliconia is close to the larger star in its binary system, and the Phagors have been driven into exile, but conflicting religions and hostility to science keep human civilization fragmented and constantly fighting wars over petty power and fertile land as a plague devastates populations. However, everything changes when a secret visitor from the observer satellite from Earth accepts a slow death in order to visit the planet and spend his time in the sunlight and open air.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities8 Reviews
3.5
Duane Rygh
Created 2 months agoShare
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Harshitha
Created 6 months agoShare
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Denise Thomas
Created over 5 years agoShare
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Metaphorosis Reviews
Created over 7 years agoShare
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“http://reviews.metaphorosis.com/?post_type=review&p=1064&preview=true
2.5 stars
On a planet with a complex orbit and centuries-long seasons, humans dominate the warmer times, only in some places living quietly with phagors and other sentient species. Their lives are observed remotely by Earth, via the Avernus, an orbital observation station. On the station, whose occupants have their own fascination with Helliconia's royal scandals, one resident has just won a lottery, offering him a ticket to the surface, and to certain death.
After the sweeping, Michenerian scope of the <em>Spring</em> volume, Aldiss tries hard to bring the story to a human scale in <em>Helliconia Summer.</em> He frames the story with an abandoned queen, pining for her cruel husband, and he comes back to her occasionally and toward the midpoint of the volume. But it's an artifice that is only partially successful. There's not enough foundation for the queen's situation to support the groaning, top-heavy mass of social and historical commentary that burdens the first half of the book.
More successful is the introduction of an outside observer. Billy Xiao-Pin, from the Avernus orbital station. His presence seemingly forces Aldiss to stick more close to a limited range of time and space, making the story both easier and more interesting to follow. Even when Billy is out of the picture, the story stays close to its other lead characters, and in particular King JangolAnganol, a tragic figure all of whose options are bad.
The result is a slow, but still much more intimate and entertaining book than its prequel. While first half is slow, the second begins to fulfill the promise that Aldiss must have hoped for with his reams of setup and background in the <em>Spring</em> volume. By the end, one feels somewhat satisfied - much the feeling of finally reaching "Of Beren and Luthien" after plowing through the duller bits of Tolkien's <em>Quenta Silmarillion.</em>”
Angharad
Created almost 8 years agoShare
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About Brian W. Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss was born in Norfolk, England, in 1925. Over a long and distinguished writing career, he published award‑winning science fiction (two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award); bestselling popular fiction, including the three‑volume Horatio Stubbs saga and the four‑volume the Squire Quartet; experimental fiction such as Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head; and many other iconic and pioneering works, including the Helliconia Trilogy. 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). Among his many short stories, perhaps the most famous was “Super‑Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick and produced and directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Brian W. Aldiss passed away in 2017 at the age of 92.
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