Brian Aldiss - Helliconia Spring

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 corsetted 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

Thanks for invaluable preliminary discussions go to Professor Tom Shippey (philology), Dr. J. M. Roberts (history) and Mr. Desmond Morris (anthropology). I also wish to thank Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen (pathology) and Dr. Jack Cohen (biology) for factual suggestions. Anything sound philologically is owed to Professor Tom Shippey; his lively enthustasm has been of great help all along.

The globe of Helliconia itself was designed and built by Dr. Peter Cattermole, from its geology to its weather. For the cosmology and astronomy, I am indebted to Dr. Iain Nicolson, whose patience over the years is a cause for particular gratitude.

Dr. Mick Kelly and Dr. Norman Myers both gave up-to-date advice on winters other than natural ones. The structure of the Great Wheel owes much to Dr. Joern Bambeck. James Lovelock kindly allowed me to employ his concept of Caia in this fictional form. Herr Wolfgang Jeschke’s interest in this project from its early days has been vital.

My debt to the writings and friendship of Dr. J. T. Fraser and to David Wingrove (for being protean) is apparent.

To my wife, Margaret, loving thanks for letting Helliconia take over for so long, and for working on it with me.

My dear Clive,

In my previous novel LIFE IN THE WEST, I sought to depict something of the malaise sweeping the world, painting as wide a canvas as I felt I could confidently tackle.

My partial success left me ambitious and dissatisfied. I resolved to start again. All art is a metaphor, but some art forms are more metaphorical then others; perhaps, I thought, I would do better with a more oblique approach. So I developed Helliconia: a place much like our world, with only one factor changed—the length of the year. It was to be a stage for the kind of drama in which we are embroiled in our century.

In order to achieve some verisimilitude, I consulted experts, who convinced me that my little Helliconia was mere fantasy, I needed something much more solid.

Invention took over from allegory. A good thing, too. With the prompting of scientific fact, whole related series of new images crowded into my conscious mind. I have deployed them as best I could. When I was farthest away from my original conception—at the apastron of my earliest intentions—I discovered that I was expressing dualities that were as relevant to our century as to Helliconia’s.

It could hardly be otherwise. For the people of Helliconia, and the non-people, the beasts, and other personages, interest us only if they our concerns. No one wants a passport to a nation of talking slugs.

So I offer you this volume for your enjoyment, hoping you will find more to agree with than you did in LIFE IN THE WEST—and maybe even more to amuse you.

Your affectionate

Father

Begbroke

Oxford

Death of a Grandfather

Why have so many heroic deeds recurrently dropped out of mind and found no shrine in lasting monuments of fame? The answer, I believe, is that this world is newly made ; its origin is a recent event, not one of remote antiquity.

That is why even now some arts are still being perfected: the process of development is still going on. Yes, and it is not long since the truth about nature was first discovered, and I myself am even now the first who has been found to render this revelation into my native speech…

This is how Yuli, son of Alehaw, came to a place called Oldorando, where his descendants flourished in the better days that were to come.

Yuli was seven years old, virtually a grown man, when he crouched under a skin bivouac with his father and gazed down the wilderness of a land known even at that time as Campannlat. He had roused from a light doze with his father’s elbow in his rib and his harsh voice saying, “Storm’s dying.”

The storm had been blowing from the west for three days, bringing with it snow and particles of ice off the Baffiers. It filled the world with howling energy, transforming it to a grey-white darkness, like a great voice that no nun could withstand. The ledge on which the bivouac was pitched afforded little protection from the worst of the blast; father and son could do nothing but he where they were under the skin, dozing, once in a while chewing on a piece of smoked fish, while the weather battered away above their heads.

As the wind expired, the snow arrived in spurts, twitching in feather-like flurries across the drab landscape. Although Freyr was high in the sky—for the hunters were within the tropics—it seemed to hang there frozen. The lights rippled overhead in shawl after golden shawl, the fringes of which seemed to touch the ground, while the folds rose up and up until they vanished in the leaden zenith of heaven. The lights gave little illumination, no warmth.