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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.… (more)
User reviews
Although I still find the prose a bit stilted at times, I found this a much more accessible book than the first in the series, "Helliconia Winter." In part, this must be because the tale is told on a more human scale, over a period of a few years and with a smaller cast of characters. Yet it manages to range over a wider part of the surface of the world of Helliconia and tells us much more about why it is the way it is and the various races which inhabit it. Some of this is done through the narrative device of the earth observing station, which allows any difficulties to be explained without the narrator's own voice needing to intrude, but much is done through the discoveries of the characters themselves. The smaller timescale provides more characters that one can engage with, and they are suitably complex - few are entirely evil or entirely sympathetic and none could be described as a hero.
But there are some annoyances in the story-telling which at crucial times becomes the servant of the author's grander vision of an entire ecosystem. Characters who are crucial to much of the plot development are later abandoned with a vague nod to the philosophical notion that, in the end, none of us really matter in the great scheme of things. True as this might be, we've just spent 400 pages reading about their life's ups and downs and, as readers, we're expecting a little more.
But if you can tolerate these flaws, this is a worthwhile read, and one doesn't need to have read its predecessor to get value from it.