Helliconia Trilogy

Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand.

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.

After many centuries, the flowering of human civilization has begun to dwindle again and the Great Year slowly progresses while the long, deadly cold winter looms-but a break in the long, repeating cycles of growth and decay may result from the long-ago visit of the Earthman. New legends of the spring and summer have evolved and a new future may be aborning.

From a Science Fiction Grand Master: The sweeping epic of a planet veering from one extreme atmosphere to another-and the humans trying to survive on it. Helliconia Spring introduces us to a tumultuous world that follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system-and the satellite from Earth secretly monitoring it. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Brian W. Aldiss then explores the social and religious divisions keeping the planet's population in conflict even as they're devastated by plague in Helliconia Summer, and concludes the trilogy with Helliconia Winter, which recounts both the threat of a looming, frigid age of decay and the hope of a new future. The Helliconia Trilogy is both a riveting story and a thought-provoking examination of how our destinies are shaped by the environment around us. Aldiss's study of fields from astronomy to climatology to geobiology endow all three novels with rich details of the planet Helliconia. This riveting, century-spanning saga is a timely exploration of what climate change can mean for our own planet.