INTRODUCTION TO THE EBOOK EDITION

 

Two years passed before I began to write the first of this three-volume account of a distant planetary system.  I spent that time in search of facts and in ordering various imaginings. On the one hand, the scientific hand, I needed an unfilterable virus; while on the other hand, I felt we needed an observation post—a post needful to observe the activities of this strange planet, but one that would keep the reader in comfortable touch with our own world.

For Earth, too, is changing as time passes. Yet time on Helliconia is an altogether more considerable force. Instead of our little tinpot year of 365 days, on this other planet one year lasts for five thousand years.

Walking the streets of a Northern town, a writer friend and I discussed ‘Time’ as an almost disregarded regulator of our days. This friend was Bob Shaw. He went on to create ‘slow glass’ in which to trap time. 
I struggled with my gigantic Helliconian year, while asking questions of the learned of Oxford and elsewhere.

How this long year might come about was an astronomical matter.

My final construction was to have the Helliconian planet in orbit about an ordinary sun, not unlike our sun. But this combination has been captured by a much grander luminary, a giant among suns (Freyr, so called); it is about this sun that the planet and its minor sun revolve.

Some astronomers at the time believed this to be an impossible construct. However, in 2011, NASA telescopes discerned just such a constellation as I had conjured up. The news hit the front page of the New York Times—though sadly without mentioning that I had been there first. The fact is that I had got it right, well ahead of time—and was well pleased!

Back in Oxford, I took lunch with Professor John Roberts, Warden of Merton College, who had then recently published a fascinating book, THE TRIUMPH OF THE WEST. In his earlier book, entitled THE HUTCHINSON HISTORY OF THE WORLD, he had included as an illustration a cover from an October “Fantastic Stories”.  He was just the man to answer my question: what would happen to civilization over those long Helliconian winters? Could it be maintained?

I left Merton with almost more knowledge than I could accommodate, only to find myself faced with another question. With Helliconia’s lengthy division between summer and winter, those extended seasons, might it not be plausible, in fact highly likely, that two separate types of life form might develop?

So, mankind and phagor emerged upon the scene. Oh, the phagors, the ancipitals!—I was always on their side!

The ‘Spring’ novel opens with a struggle between man and phagor on the very lips of spring. A signifier of what is to follow.

There is always a question of what a place will look like. All the Helliconian flora and fauna will have adapted to the extremes of temperature. Professor James Lovelock, who later became a friend, had developed his theory of geo-physiological systems in his inspiring Gaia hypothesis; that was another encouragement to think anew. I could not come up with anything feasible: sequoias two miles high, radishes as big as footballs, giant pumpkins the size of grapes?

Surely, no.

I was travelling by train from Oxford to London. We were passing Didcot power station, the four towers of which were emitting quantities of steam. The sun, setting behind the towers, had turned the steam in shadow black, so that in consequence, it looked much like foliage, hanging over giant trees. 
Helliconia trees! And I thought that when winter was encroaching, leaves would not blow away in air to the ground; instead they would shrink back with their boughs into the hollow of the tree, where they would melt down to form a kind of waxen cap for protection against cold, until their reemergence when at length spring returned.

Splendid! So then I was free, away, and telling the stories at last.

What are the implications of such imaginings? Are they not an enhancement of our consciousness? To quote Jung again, “Man...is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence—without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to an unknown end.”

And does not imaginative fiction serve to enlarge and enrich consciousness? I can’t think otherwise.

 

Brian W. Aldiss

2012