A Song of Three Seasons: The SF Game of Thrones

It is a world where the seasons last for years, where summers can span decades and devastating winters can threaten to destroy civilisation altogether. In the warmth of summer, princes and kings do battle and play their games of thrones. But in the depths of the coldest winters, the humans seek shelter behind the walls of their castles and cities. Strange creatures appear our of the uttermost north and move south in great migrations which threaten humanity with extinction. This all unfolds on a world called...Helliconia?

Maps and charts of Helliconia, created by Brian W. Aldiss whilst writing his trilogy.

In 1982 Brian W. Aldiss published the novel Helliconia Spring. One of the grandmasters of science fiction, renowned for books like Hothouse, Non-Stop and Report on Probability A, as well as works of mainstream fiction and poetry, Aldiss had made the surprising decision to return to SF on a grand scale. For this trilogy he tapped a wellspring of local talent and expertise. Living in Oxford, with the university and its plethora of experts in every field of science imaginable at hand, Aldiss set out to create the single most detailed, expanse planet ever described in science fiction. And he succeeded. Helliconia remains the most remarkable feat of worldbuilding in SF history, outstripping even Frank Herbert's Arrakis (famously detailed in his Dune novels) for the vigour of its scientific plausibility.

At the heart of Aldiss's trilogy is an idea that modern fans of fantasy may find familiar: a world where the seasons last not just three months, but years and even centuries. But unlike George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the seasons of Helliconia are rooted in real scientific principles.

Helliconia is an Earth-like planet approximately 28% larger than Earth but with a more pronounced axial tilt of 35 degrees. This results in the planet having enormous icecaps which are larger than Earth's, but the planet nevertheless retains as much surface area as Earth, extending over three continents: the northern polar continent of Sibornal, the southern polar continent of Hespagorat and the equatorial continent of Campannlat, which is linked to Sibornal by a land bridge.

More important is the make-up of Helliconia's star system. Helliconia orbits at G4 star Batalix (an orange dwarf, somewhat smaller and less bright than our sun) at a distance of somewhat less than 1 AU (so Helliconia receives slightly less solar output than Earth). Batalix, in turn, orbits the A-class blue supergiant star Frey in a highly elliptical orbit. At apastron, the moment of greatest separation, Batalix is 710 AU from Freyr (for comparison, Pluto at its most distant from the Sun is still only 49 AU away); at periastron, the moment of minimal separation, Batalix is 236 AU from Freyr.

The orbits of Helliconia and Batalix around the star Freyr (not to scale).

The result of this orbital dance is that Helliconia enjoys a "small year" of roughly 480 days, the time it takes to orbit Batalix once, and a Great Year of 1,825 small years (2,592 Earth years). During a Great Winter, when Freyr is so distant it becomes merely the brightest star in the sky, the great ice completely buries Sibornal and extends deep into Campannlat, forcing humans to live in a narrow habitable strip across the equator. During a Great Summer, where Freyr dominates the sky and the ice has withdrawn far to the north and south, there are great exoduses from the equatorial belt (where great fires consume the forests) in favour of the coasts and the arctic continents.

It is revealed later in the novels that this arrangement is, relatively speaking, new: Batalix was captured by Freyr's gravity during a chance encounter eight million years ago. Prior to that time Helliconia was permanently a much colder world, and it was the capture that allowed humanity to evolve from an earlier primate species.

This push and pull of civilisation across millennia is echoed by a more personal threat: Helliconia is also home to a second sentient species. The phagors or ancipitals are a race of fur-covered creatures similar to mythical minotaurs. The phagors are optimised for life in the cold and are stronger and more formidable than humans in personal combat; however, they are (arguably) less intelligent and have never developed technology beyond that of the hunter-gather stage. During the Great Winters the phagors are the dominant species on Helliconia, whilst humans gain the upper hand during the Great Summers and force the phagors back to the polar continents.

Aldiss uses this ebb and flow of the seasons and species to drive his story. In each of the three novels in The Helliconia Trilogy (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter) Aldiss uses the change of seasons to chronicle the rise and fall of kingdoms, civilisation but, more important, individuals, who change, grow and learn from the ever-changing world around them.

A Song of Ice and Fire can clearly be seen as the fantasy equivalent of Helliconia. Scientifically and astronomically-minded fans have spent large amounts of time coming up with maps and charts of how the seasons might work in such a star system, sometimes drawing on dark matter or invisible neutron stars to explain the required orbital eccentricities. They are sadly doomed in such attempts, for there is no such scientific explanation: George R.R. Martin has been constant in his promise that the reasons for the long seasons of Westeros and Essos are magical, not scientific.

Still, they might take comfort that, fourteen years before Martin published A Game of Thrones, another author took on the same concept with a scientific viewpoint and delivered one of the greatest works of science fiction ever published. The influence of Helliconia on A Song of Ice and Fire is speculative - Martin has almost certainly read the series given its prominence but has never mentioned it to my knowledge - but certainly the parallels between the two series are fascinating.

Helliconia Winter by Brian W. Aldiss

The world of Helliconia is moving away from the supergiant star Freyr. The Great Winter is about to descend on the planet with full, unmitigated fury. The tropical continent of Campannlat is ill-prepared to deal with the falling temperatures, and the defeat of their armies by the forces of the harsh northern landmass of Sibornal signals the beginning of the end of their period of dominance. Luterin Shokerandit, a soldier in the Sibornalese army, returns home in triumph, only to face treachery. The ruthless leader of Sibornal, the Oligarch, has decreed that the victorious army is returning home infested with plague, and cannot be allowed to reach succor.


Meanwhile, life on the Earth Observation Station Avernus, in orbit around Helliconia for almost four millennia, is drawing to an end as the inhabitants revert to savage barbarism, even as the world beneath them falls from the glories of Summer into the abyss of Winter. But some in Sibornal have vowed that humanity and civilisation will ride out the Winter no matter the cost in blood...

Helliconia Winter picks up the story of the world of Helliconia 478 local years - 669 Earth years - after the events of Helliconia Summer. As before, whilst the individual characters who starred in the previous novel are long dead the fall-out of their actions continues to have consequences in this novel, although in this case at something of a remove, since the action is now transplanted to the northern continent of Sibornal. Here, we follow a band of characters led by the betrayed Luterin as he struggles to return to his distant home in the Shivenink Chain, giving rise to what, potentially, should have been the most dynamic storyline in The Helliconia Trilogy. Instead, we get a travelogue. A fascinating, intelligent, well thought-out travelogue, but nevertheless there is the feeling of Aldiss pointing out the cool scenery at the expense of developing his themes in tandem with the plot.


This is not to say that the themes Aldiss wished to explore with the trilogy have been neglected, but they have been shunted into a somewhat unfocused subplot that ranges from the Avernus back to Earth and to one of Earth's almost-failed colony worlds. These ideas are interesting and intelligently-handled, but whilst in Spring and Summer they integrated nicely into the Helliconian story, here they are separated, to the detriment of both. That said, it is satisfying to get an answer for the mystery of why the Helliconian afterlife spirits went from angry, monstrous creatures in Helliconia Spring to peaceful, loving entities in Helliconia Summer, and these developments do a good job of tying the relevance of events in the two earlier books to the events of this one.

On the plus side, Aldiss's gift for invention remains formidable here. The landforms the characters pass through, the political machinations within the government of Sibornal and its member-states and the constant evolution of the flora and fauna of Helliconia to deal with its climatic extremes all remain stunning. His characters are similarly well-drawn and convincing, but it has to be said in this case they are mostly unpleasant and selfish characters whose ambitions and motivations are interesting on an intellectual level, but unengaging on an emotional one. In particular, his female characters receive short shrift here, which is odd especially after the first book in the series (where it is the women of Oldorando who drive forward its scientific and technological development). The ending is also rather more unsatisfying than in the first two books, where the ambiguous conclusions are alleviated by us learning what happened next in historical texts mentioned in the succeeding volume. With no succeeding volume to Helliconia Winter, the ending is too abrupt.

Helliconia Winter (****) is packed with inventive ideas, fascinating characters and some genuinely exciting and dramatic moments. However, it is the weakest book of the trilogy, with an unsatisfying ending and a cold, remote prose style that is not as engaging as the first two books in the series. Nevertheless, the ambition and achievement of the trilogy as a whole remains stunning. The novel is available now in the USA and in the UK will be reissued as part of the new Helliconia omnibus due for release on 12 August this year.

Wertzone Classics: Helliconia Summer by Brian W. Aldiss

Helliconia basks in the glow of the Great Summer. The continent of Campannlat is now dominated by the Holy Empire, a loose religious affiliation between the three great kingdoms of Pannoval, Oldorando and Borlien. These nations find themselves threatened by the far less technologically-advanced but considerably more populous jungle and desert nations to the west and the even more savage tribes to the east. When King JandolAnganol suffers a humiliating defeat to tribesmen using firearms (bought at great cost from the progressive nations of Sibornal far to the north), he divorces his wife so he might seek a more favourable alliance by marrying a princess of Oldorando. However, the queen is a greatly popular figure in Borlien and by divorcing her the king enrages the native population, triggering political turmoil and military action that will have great ramifications for all of Helliconia.


Meanwhile, the crew of the Earth Observation Station Avernus have fallen into internal dissent and debate over the nature of reality and their own orders from distant Earth not to interfere with life on Helliconia. Rejecting this order from a world they can never see or return to, the crew hold a lottery with a grand prize: to allow the winner to visit Helliconia, so for the brief few months it will take for the planet's viruses and bacteria to kill him he can live under a real sky. The arrival of Billy Xiao Pin in Borlien's capital likewise triggers events that will have unforeseen consequences.

Helliconia Summer picks up the story of the world of Helliconia some 355 local years - more than 500 Earth years - after the conclusion of Helliconia Spring. The planet is not far from its time of closest approach to the supergiant star Freyr and humanity rules supreme over the planet, the phagor population reduced to slavery or forced to hide in remote mountain valleys. It is a time of great technological innovation, with firearms, gunpowder and cannons flowing south from Sibornal, but also of turmoil, with the doctrines of the Pannovalan Church stifling the advance of technology and science within Campannlat itself. Like its forebear, the novel mixes thematic elements such as the rise and fall of civilisations, the advance of science and the uneasy union of progress and religion, with a more traditional action and character-driven narrative.

Helliconia Summer, appropriately, sprawls luxuriantly where its forebear was more focused and constrained in narrative scope and geographical area. It is in this novel that Aldiss' achievement in creating Helliconia is best-realised, with lush descriptions of the world and its myriad animal life and human cultures in full flower. The main storyline is compelling, combining intriguing politics and well-realised (if not particularly likable) characters clashing over the fate of their kingdoms in the face of warfare, religious turmoil and arguments over the fate of the phagors, the dominant nonhuman species of Helliconia reduced by the heat into docile soldier-slaves. The relevance of having an observation station from Earth is also made clearer in this novel, with one of the Avernus crewmembers becoming an important character. There are also some intriguing mysteries, such as a murder mystery whose conclusion is ambiguous and a deeper one surrounding the changes in pauk, the bizarre ability of the Helliconian people to commune with the spirits of their ancestors after death, which provide much food-for-thought going into the third and final novel.


On the negative side, the book suffers slightly from its lack of focus compared to the first volume and also from a somewhat clumsy chronological structure, where the first several chapters take place in the present and then we rewind a year and move forward to where the first part began, then skip to after it. The story doesn't really require this structure and would perhaps have benefited from a more linear progression.

In Helliconia Summer (****½) Aldiss' grand ambition, nothing less than a history of an entire world and its peoples across vast chasms of time, becomes clearer and more impressive. The book is available now (albeit somewhat expensively) in the USA and will form part of the new UK Helliconia omnibus due on 12 August this year.

Wertzone Classics: Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss

Yuli is a child of a hunter-gatherer family living under the light of two suns on the northern plains of Campannlat on the frigid, ice-wrapped planet of Helliconia. When his father is enslaved by the vicious phagors, Yuli is left alone. He finds his way to the subterranean city of Pannoval, where he prospers as a member of the priesthood. Tiring of torturing heretics and punishing renegades, he elects to flee the oppressive city with some like-minded allies, eventually founding the settlement of Oldorando some distance away.


Fifty years later, Yuli's descendants have conquered a larger town, renaming it Oldorando as well, and are prospering. Game is becoming more plentiful, the river is thawing and warmer winds are rising, even as the smaller sun, Freyr, grows larger in the sky. But with peace and plenty comes indolence and corruption, and the people of Oldorando find themselves bickering and feuding for power, even as a great crusade of phagors leaves their icy homes in the eastern mountains on a quest to slaughter as many humans as possible.

The great drama of life on Helliconia is observed from an orbiting Earth space station, the Avernus, the crew of which watch as Helliconia and its sun, Batalix, draw closer to the great white supergiant about which they revolve and the centuries-long winter comes to a violent end.

Helliconia Spring (originally published in 1982) is the first volume in Brian Aldiss' masterpiece, The Helliconia Trilogy. In this work, Aldiss has constructed the supreme achievement of science fiction worldbuilding: Helliconia, a planet located in a binary star system a thousand light-years distant from Earth. Batalix and Helliconia take 2,592 years to orbit Freyr in a highly elliptical orbit (Helliconia is three times further from Freyr at its most distant point than nearest), which results in seasons that last for centuries apiece. Helliconia's plants, animal and sentient lifeforms have all biologically adapted to this unusual arrangement (in a manner that prevents colonisation by Earthlings, who would be killed quickly by the planet's bacteria), but its civilisations have not adapted satisfactorily: humanity rises in the spring and becomes dominant in the summer before being toppled by the phagors in the autumn and enslaved in the winter. However, more evidence has survived of the previous cycle than normal, and this time around those humans who have discovered the truth have vowed to ensure that humanity will survive the next Great Winter triumphant over its ancestral enemy.


Helliconia Spring is a complex novel working on a literal storytelling level - the factional battles for control over Oldorando and Pannoval, the phagor crusade flooding across the continent and the search for truth and understanding of the Helliconian star system by Oldorando's scientists - and also on thematic ones, with Aldiss examining the struggles between religion and science, between those who thrive in peace and those who thrive in war and the duality of winter and summer, humanity and phagor, and though the religious ritual of pauk, between the living and the dead.

Having the orbital Earth platform is a good idea, as it gives us a literal scientific understanding of the Helliconia system which those on the surface are struggling to understand, even if it does feel a little removed from the storyline at this time. Amongst other criticisms are a lack of character closure: whilst the grand history of Helliconia and the thematic elements continue to be explored in Helliconia Summer, the story itself moves on several hundred years, leaving the main characters of this book long dead. But these are outweighed by the strengths: the effective and impressive prose, the fantastic descriptions of a near-frozen planet thawing into life with its millions of species of plant and animal life waking up under the two suns and the impressive melding of cold, impersonal scientific worldbuilding with a satisfying plot and vividly-described characters.

Helliconia Spring (*****) is a masterpiece of science fiction and features the single most impressive work of SF worldbuilding to date. The novel is available now in the USA. A new omnibus edition of the entire trilogy will be published by Gollancz as part of the SF Masterworks collection on 12 August 2010.

Brian Aldiss' HELLICONIA returning to print

On 12 August 2010 Gollancz are reissuing Brian Aldiss' colossal Helliconia Trilogy in one omnibus volume, simply entitled Helliconia.


The trilogy was originally published as three volumes, Helliconia Spring (1982), Helliconia Summer (1983) and Helliconia Winter (1985). When asked about the absence of autumn, Aldiss replied that he wasn't Vivaldi and he felt that three books was enough to explore his ideas. When he conceived of the idea of a single trilogy exploring one planet, Aldiss realised that the planet would have to be vigorously researched and mobilised many of his contacts in multiple disciplines at Oxford University for advice on geography, biology, geology and orbital mechanics, amongst other areas, resulting in a world remarkable for its depth and detail.

The trilogy, which commences some six thousand years in our future, spans thousands of years in the history of Helliconia, an Earth-like world which has a complex life-cycle stemming from its position in a binary star system. Helliconia orbits Batalix, an orange dwarf, which in turn orbits Freyr, a blue supergiant one thousand light-years from Earth. It takes over 2,500 years for a 'Great Year', a full orbit of Batalix around Freyr, to be completed. When Helliconia is furthest from Freyr, the planet becomes a frozen icefield, whilst at its closest the entire planet is baked in heat and the equatorial belt becomes uninhabitable. As the Great Years pass the planet is locked in a Darwinian battle between two species, a humanoid-like race which thrives in the summer but wanes in the winter, and the ice-loving phagors. Events on Helliconia are observed by an orbital space station from Earth, and a minor subplot has the crew of the station debating on whether or not to interfere with events on Helliconia.

The Helliconia Trilogy is one of science fiction's most outstanding achievements, with the world of Helliconia representing the pinnacle of SF worldbuilding to date (far exceeding, in my opinion, Frank Herbert's Arrakis and only really being challenged by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars, although the latter has the advantage of actually existing). Its return to print is great news, and I will be re-reading and re-reviewing the trilogy later this year.