Helliconia
This review has been a long time coming - the boycreature loaned me his big burly three-books-in-one-volume GIANT of a sci-fi classic sometime I think in December. Finished it last week. That is so far removed from my usual reading speed I feel a bit sick with myself for admitting it, but I suppose I WAS frantically job-hunting and also caught up in university stuffs, what with being a full-time grad student and all. One of the things I will enjoy most after completing my dissertation: devouring books which have almost nothing to do with theory.
I say that, and yet Helliconia is absolutely saturated with theory. Brian Aldiss did him some amazing homework on geology and ecology. He took such care with building the world, and it shines throughout the three books as the central character. I would actually love to find a Helliconia roleplay somewhere out there in the wilds of the interwebs, because the setting is so rich and rewarding just in and of itself. You could roleplay a tree and it would be captivating, just by virtue of all the biological mechanisms that come into play in a binary star system where each of the planet's seasons lasts about 600 of its years / orbits around the smaller parent star.
The characters are a bit less captivating, probably for all the love that went into their homeworld(s). Individuals are most interesting in light of the ripple-effects their actions have centuries after their life stories have played out. Yuli and the residents of Embruddock / Oldorando are the first and best examples of this, although King JandolAnganol and SartoriIrvrash in Summer were also, I think, very well-handled. I just wish the Queen and the Priest-Militant from the northern continent had developed more. Really the only women who have any lasting impact at all are, ironically, the tribeswomen of "the Savage Continent" at the dawn of Spring, and one bad-ass merchant's daughter from the southern pole. Shay Tal and Immya Muntras are probably the most three-dimensional and satisfyingly realized female characters, and they feature in the first and second books respectively.
Really I'm not sure what was happening with the third volume. Character-wise, it was mightily disappointing. I don't think any one character except the drunken ex-military man was even internally consistent at all. Actually, the mercantile families in Winter were, like their predecessors in Summer, the most interesting of the bunch, but sadly sidelined into plot devices for the perpetually befuddled and not-at-all sympathetic lead actor. It was really for the sake of the jumps back to the Avernus (artificial satellite which orbits and observes Helliconia, broadcasting back to Earth) and Earth-related episodes that I endured the narratives surrounding Luterin Shokerandit and Toress Lahl.
Oh Toress. Even more so than Odi Jeseratabhar the Priest-Militant, this was a female character who could have been SO much more than a Woman Victim Of The Underdeveloped Civilization Dat Keeps Da Ladeez Down. She was a scientist and the life-partner of an army general for fuck's sake. Her culture and learnings are centuries ahead of Shay Tal's, figuratively and literally. What comes of that? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing beyond some ecosystem exposition which by this volume is absolutely pointless and redundant, and some very problematic rape dynamics. I get that she is part of a wider cycle of pathos and may actually be quite a brilliant foil to current terrestrial concepts of "progress" along a unidirectional timeline...
But sweet JAY-zuss, where the hell are the Earth-women to whom I can contrast her sorry case? Of the handful of individuals that get zoomed in upon on the enlightened Earth, what are the women up to? Oh right, banging that oh-so-enlightened yet dreamily inquisitive guy whose teacher is, yeah, another much older dude who likes to listen to the banging while he pretends to sleep. Awesome. We've come a long way, baby.
For all the femirage-inducingness, though, it's still, as I say, a beautifully realized world. And at the societal, national, and global levels, it makes for a truly engaging story. I was very sorry not to see more of the phagors (the elder race of Helliconia, descended from horned bovines and something like minotaurs) in Winter, especially given that this is the season in which they recover their numbers and their dominance over Helliconian humankind. Summer saw them preparing for this event, hundreds and hundreds of years in advance, and I think it would have been great to see that plot thread woven into something in the third volume. It's just another lost track that leaves the first two books feeling a lot more connected and the third sitting apart like, well, a third wheel, at least on the level of societal histories.
Nevertheless, was totes worth the read. I could write loads more trying to unpack the slightly discomfiting racial rhetoric underlying the new-and-improved Earth humanity, and wax dirty-hippie on the Gaia Hypothesis beating its drum throughout, but I will just say that I very strongly wish more sci-fi had (A) primary cultures of non-white origins, and (2) a Gaia-Hypothesis-like framework, though perhaps a little more subtle. Spoiler-that-is-not-at-all-a-spoiler: the author is NOT subtle about the integrated nature of planetary systems, but he can get away with it because Helliconia's biosphere is just so damn interesting and besides it was the 80's and people really needed to be beaten over the head with it. Actually we still do today. Perhaps not beaten, though, but demonstrated to very clearly that HEY humanity, this is what happens when you shit where you sleep - the planet shits right back and flings it at you. So respect yo mama, or she WILL stop the car, make you get out, and go on without you.
I say that, and yet Helliconia is absolutely saturated with theory. Brian Aldiss did him some amazing homework on geology and ecology. He took such care with building the world, and it shines throughout the three books as the central character. I would actually love to find a Helliconia roleplay somewhere out there in the wilds of the interwebs, because the setting is so rich and rewarding just in and of itself. You could roleplay a tree and it would be captivating, just by virtue of all the biological mechanisms that come into play in a binary star system where each of the planet's seasons lasts about 600 of its years / orbits around the smaller parent star.
The characters are a bit less captivating, probably for all the love that went into their homeworld(s). Individuals are most interesting in light of the ripple-effects their actions have centuries after their life stories have played out. Yuli and the residents of Embruddock / Oldorando are the first and best examples of this, although King JandolAnganol and SartoriIrvrash in Summer were also, I think, very well-handled. I just wish the Queen and the Priest-Militant from the northern continent had developed more. Really the only women who have any lasting impact at all are, ironically, the tribeswomen of "the Savage Continent" at the dawn of Spring, and one bad-ass merchant's daughter from the southern pole. Shay Tal and Immya Muntras are probably the most three-dimensional and satisfyingly realized female characters, and they feature in the first and second books respectively.
Really I'm not sure what was happening with the third volume. Character-wise, it was mightily disappointing. I don't think any one character except the drunken ex-military man was even internally consistent at all. Actually, the mercantile families in Winter were, like their predecessors in Summer, the most interesting of the bunch, but sadly sidelined into plot devices for the perpetually befuddled and not-at-all sympathetic lead actor. It was really for the sake of the jumps back to the Avernus (artificial satellite which orbits and observes Helliconia, broadcasting back to Earth) and Earth-related episodes that I endured the narratives surrounding Luterin Shokerandit and Toress Lahl.
Oh Toress. Even more so than Odi Jeseratabhar the Priest-Militant, this was a female character who could have been SO much more than a Woman Victim Of The Underdeveloped Civilization Dat Keeps Da Ladeez Down. She was a scientist and the life-partner of an army general for fuck's sake. Her culture and learnings are centuries ahead of Shay Tal's, figuratively and literally. What comes of that? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing beyond some ecosystem exposition which by this volume is absolutely pointless and redundant, and some very problematic rape dynamics. I get that she is part of a wider cycle of pathos and may actually be quite a brilliant foil to current terrestrial concepts of "progress" along a unidirectional timeline...
But sweet JAY-zuss, where the hell are the Earth-women to whom I can contrast her sorry case? Of the handful of individuals that get zoomed in upon on the enlightened Earth, what are the women up to? Oh right, banging that oh-so-enlightened yet dreamily inquisitive guy whose teacher is, yeah, another much older dude who likes to listen to the banging while he pretends to sleep. Awesome. We've come a long way, baby.
For all the femirage-inducingness, though, it's still, as I say, a beautifully realized world. And at the societal, national, and global levels, it makes for a truly engaging story. I was very sorry not to see more of the phagors (the elder race of Helliconia, descended from horned bovines and something like minotaurs) in Winter, especially given that this is the season in which they recover their numbers and their dominance over Helliconian humankind. Summer saw them preparing for this event, hundreds and hundreds of years in advance, and I think it would have been great to see that plot thread woven into something in the third volume. It's just another lost track that leaves the first two books feeling a lot more connected and the third sitting apart like, well, a third wheel, at least on the level of societal histories.
Nevertheless, was totes worth the read. I could write loads more trying to unpack the slightly discomfiting racial rhetoric underlying the new-and-improved Earth humanity, and wax dirty-hippie on the Gaia Hypothesis beating its drum throughout, but I will just say that I very strongly wish more sci-fi had (A) primary cultures of non-white origins, and (2) a Gaia-Hypothesis-like framework, though perhaps a little more subtle. Spoiler-that-is-not-at-all-a-spoiler: the author is NOT subtle about the integrated nature of planetary systems, but he can get away with it because Helliconia's biosphere is just so damn interesting and besides it was the 80's and people really needed to be beaten over the head with it. Actually we still do today. Perhaps not beaten, though, but demonstrated to very clearly that HEY humanity, this is what happens when you shit where you sleep - the planet shits right back and flings it at you. So respect yo mama, or she WILL stop the car, make you get out, and go on without you.