Damian's 3 favorite reads in 2024

This is the first book in the Helliconia trilogy, among the most engrossing and evocative books I have ever read in any genre. It made an enormous impact on me the first time I read it as a 16/17 year old. On this recent re-read, I had an underlay of remembering the experience of the first read and how I perceived it then, as I formed new impressions of it on this fourth or fifth read. This was a strange and charming sensation, like standing in a building whose smell reminds you of childhood experiences.

Brian Aldiss is one of the greats of science fiction, perhaps not mentioned as frequently as the ‘golden age writers’ (who cannot hold a candle to his writing skills) or even other greats such as Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delaney or Ray Bradbury, rightly known for their wonderful writing. He contributed enormously to SF both as an editor (often with Harry Harrison), critic (‘Trillion Year Spree’, written with David Wingrove, is the definitive statement of SF up to the mid 80s) and as a leading exponent of speculative fiction that overcame the pretentious posturing of the New Wave but learned from its experiments. Much of his work is in shorter form; Helliconia by contrast is a trilogy of substantial novels.

The format of ‘Helliconia Spring’ is essentially a novella (‘Yuli’) followed by a short novel (‘Embruddock’), linked by some families over the generations. In ‘Yuli’, we encounter a pair of apparently human hunters, father and son, struggling against an exceptionally harsh and cold climate and against another sentient species, the phagors, who seem far better adapted to this climate. Both species seem to be operating in a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life, with the corresponding level of technology you would expect from our own history.

As this first story progresses, we learn more about this planet, the Helliconia of the title, and where the two species stand in relation to it. We learn that, five million years before the time of the story, Helliconia orbited a single star, slightly dimmer than our Sun, called Batalix. During this time, the phagors were the sole sapient species. The Batalix system, with Helliconia, is then captured by a much brighter star Freyr and settles into a lengthy, elliptical orbit around the younger, more massive newcomer. Helliconia gets warmer and the rhythm of the once-cool seasons of the regular year of Helliconia orbiting Batalix now takes place against a Great Year of the orbit around Freyr, so that Helliconia becomes very warm during the Summer of the Great Year. The central continent of the planet swings between ice-ages and steamy jungle climates; only the poles and high mountain plateaus retain their original cold. The advent of Freyr has a surge effect on evolution on Helliconia and new species arrive, including the human analogue species. Life on Helliconia now involves a struggle between the phagors and the humans, with the former in the ascendant during the Winter, when conditions almost return to the original climate, and the latter ruling the Summer.

That is the backdrop to the stories in 'Yuli' and 'Embruddock'. During the first novella, we see Yuli and his father, the hunters I mentioned above, attacked by phagors and other humans and eventually Yuli discovers an entire underground civilisation and city called Pannoval sheltering underground from the cold. This story resembles those generation starship novels (like 'Non-stop' by Aldiss himself) where the crew have forgotten the original purpose of the voyage; the people and elites of Pannoval attempted to retain some knowledge of the past but it is either hidden, restricted or lost. At the end of this novella, Yuli escapes Pannoval to a new life as the ruler of a village some distance away called Embruddock and we switch to the second part of the novel, taking place two or three generations later.

The focus of 'Embruddock' is a new cast of human characters, most but not all in the ruling class of this small community. There is a certain tension between Yuli's descendants, who renamed the village Oldorando, and the families of the previous rulers, even though they all make a loud proclamation of their unity. One character in the book, Shay Tal, establishes an academy where she and a cohort of women try to study the world around them. The rulers of Oldorando and the women of Shay Tal's academy find themselves in turmoil, puzzled by their environment and its new challenges, because the climate is now entering a period of change. Like the world we see around us now, Aldiss was ahead of things in seeing how quickly climate change can happen. Aldiss wrote Helliconia Spring in 1982, not long after James Lovelock put forward the Gaia Hypothesis which, shorn of the semi-mystical trappings foisted on it by others, essentially says that the biosphere of our planet is so interconnected and dynamic that it is almost like an organism itself, one that tends to a maintained equilibrium. This idea now permeates our understanding of global climate breakdown; in our world the climate is changing quickly because that dynamical system has received a huge shock, but here on Helliconia the shock of the advent of Freyr has passed and so the climate changes in a mmore regular way. It’s worth noting that neither the humans nor the phagors have ever had the chance to develop an industrial civilisation.

What I have described here may sound like the trivial power politics of a small community, mixed up with dry scientific speculations, but I cannot emphasise enough how wonderfully this world unfolds in front of the reader. Aldiss builds this world with what in other hands would be mere info-dumps but with him reads like an elegantly readable history mixed with an engaging popular science piece, though even that is faint praise. The inner lives of the characters, with all their personal faults and interpersonal conflicts, especially the gender-infused arguments around the role of an academy and science itself, are set out so that we are hugely engaged by their struggles. Aldiss can show us the selfishly personal (most of the characters are horrible people!) and the brutally impersonal with equal ease, making this a difficult read in parts as characters are tossed about and sometimes harshly discarded, like Shay Tal herself. There is a large cast of characters but they come and go so that at any given time we are concerned with just five or six people at a time.

But, at the risk of a cliché, the greatest character here is the planet Helliconia itself. While in 'Yuli' we were given the story of the harshness of the Winter and how humans struggle to survive it, in 'Embruddock' we are shown a frozen world almost literally bursting in to life. New lifeforms appear, old familiar ones vanish and landscapes are altered by dramatic events our protagonists barely understand. It is an incredibly detailed and complex world, imagined and rendered in vivid colours, making this one of the best and most subtly written science fiction novels I have come across.
In between the personal and the environmental is the cultural. As the world warms, the formerly elevated phagors become resentful of the growing power of the humans. We see how the religion, culture and politics of the humans have been influenced and stymied by their interactions with the phagors and by the constraints of the deep cold of the Winter, mostly in ways that they themselves do not remotely understand. This is set out with subtle hints and suggestions by Aldiss as the novel develops, bursting to life like the planet itself later on.

I mentioned above the feeling of remembering the impact this book had on me as a youngfella, especially on my perception of the world. It was around the same time that I first became interested in hillwalking and gardening, where you are watching the world around you change with the seasons. Perhaps the book impressed me because of this, or perhaps it brought about that change in me. And this part of my experience with the book is in many ways a reflection of what it is about, how we are changed and we change the world around us, both the physical and human, even as we struggle to understand them.

As the great Shay Tal says: "You think we live at the centre of the Universe. I say we live in the centre of a farmyard. Our position is so obscure that you cannot realise how obscure." My favourite character was probably Vry, with her interest in astronomy: "The Universe is not random. It is a machine. Therefore one can know its movements."

First things first; this is a Culture novel. Discussion on this centres on so-called hints about whether two characters are from the Culture. As far as I am concerned, the hints are obvious to a hedgehog on a galloping horse and to pretend otherwise is to invent an irrelevant and trivial debate. It's a Culture novel and it sits in that context in Banks' work.
The setting of this book is relatively unusual for Banks in general and the Culture series in particular, in that the society in which the story is set is at a level of technology equivalent to late medieval Europe or to India of the Mughals. Thus we are going to get to see an un-contacted planet which the Culture is on the verge of meddling with. Because our perspective is that of the people on this planet, it is never named, a clever piece of rigorous thinking from Banks. We only see the names of relevant cities, regions or states.
Like much of Banks' work, the centre of this novel is an analysis of the human condition in societies where power and wealth are concentrated, where privilege extends only to the few and where the consequences of this are visited upon the powerless. But this, I think, is a more dark version than any of the others, because its subject is when the powerless in wars and conflict and privileged societies are women. So now you know where this is going; you may take that as a content warning.
The first strand is an account by Oelph, the assistant to Doctor Vosill and also a spy for somebody identified only as "Master", to whom his account is addressed. Vosill is the personal doctor to King Quience and is a woman, unique in these patriarchal kingdoms. She is tolerated only because Vosill claims citizenship in the distant country of Drezen and because the King himself is appreciative of her ability, but her senior position in defiance of the kingdom's social mores means she is drawn into the power plays in the court, despite her own best efforts. They way she works and how successful she is also inspires more distrust among her enemies at court.
Their machinations against her are especially gendered when they seek to get her into the torture chambers; if you aren’t afraid of what might happen here you are blind. The other aspect of this storyline that is wonderfully done is how it shows Vosill, despite her best attempt to conceal the fact that she is from the Culture, cannot overcome her lack of deference and fear of the men she encounters, partly because she has advanced weaponry to back her up but also because she has not been trained to be afraid, nor has she had bitter experience to make her so. It’s all about power. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would have been just some fantasy of giving women some SF super-power to not be afraid and to punish individual bad guys, but Banks is using it in a far more important way.
The second storyline is told by an unnamed narrator, telling the story of DeWar, bodyguard to General UrLeyn, the ‘Prime Protector’ of the Protectorate of Tassasen. Protector UrLeyn is the leader of Tassasen, having killed the previous monarch in a revolt; subsequently he eliminated official terms such as King within Tassasen. At the beginning of the story the Protectorate is fast approaching a war with the neighbouring land of Ladenscion, led by barons who initially supported UrLeyn's revolution but now intend to establish themselves as independent.
This section carries two more analyses we have to pay attention to. The traditional King mentioned in the first storyline has been nudged by Vosill to make some reforms in governance, changes that are systemic and profound that temper somewhat the abuse of power (eg the rule of law), whereas the Protector, a sort of Oliver Cromwell figure (without the genocide), is shown as being merely a continuation of the concentration of power and privilege in the hands of exploitative and abusive leaders. Banks is suggesting that calling power to account, with whatever small steps you start with, however slowly, is true change, not hoping for charity or dispensation from above from a new Strongman put in place by a fake revolution.
Then there’s a conversation between DeWar and Perund, a concubine, one of the central characters in this strand. Almost every Banks novel has a shocking moment, a chapter or section that can be very difficult to read. Usually this is because it is gory or deeply unpleasant in a gruesome way, though never without purpose, but here the shocking chapter is this conversation. Any man who reads this conversation must pause for thought and must, frankly, shut up and listen and reflect on his part in the systemic nature of violence against women, even if he however rightly considers himself a 'good man who would never do that.'
I’ve read this novel three times, the first when it was hot off the presses in 98/99, the second during a re-read of the entire Culture series in 2010 or thereabouts, and now this reading. I have been impressed all over again with how subtle and intense a book it is and how it fits into Banks’ overall analysis of power and privilege, how he uses science fiction concepts and tropes to shine an unflattering (an understatement) light on our societies, even our species. And it is still unequivocally a SF novel; without those elements the story and the purpose of the book collapse.
I think during this reread of a few Culture novels, ‘Inversions’ has risen even higher in my estimation. I think it may be one of the best.

A highly recommended work of outstanding scholarship.

This is an excellent retelling of the familiar story of the betrayal of the interwar Czechoslovak republic to Nazi Germany in 1938. Fresh information is brought to bear, along with some well-established but perhaps less well known information about Czechoslovak readiness to resist the Germans in 1938, along with a sober and convincing analysis of the lack of support for the Henleinists in the so-called Sudetenland.

The parallels with modern Ukraine and Russia and the possibility of any negotiations with the fascist regime of Putin over his annexed territories in Crimea and the Donbas are there to be seen.

1. The claims of the Henleinists and the laughably-titled Lukhansk and Donetsk 'Peoples' (read gangster) republics and Russian Crimea of discrimination and linguistic chauvinism, despite the evidence of the exact opposite before the independence of Czechoslovakia/Ukraine and the subsequent violation of all democratic norms after the occupation,

2. The obvious idea that if you accept the rights of a militaristic regime to occupy one seized territory, Sudetenland and Crimea/Donbas, they will grab more; the rest of the Czech lands/Ukraine,

3. The clear and unambiguous ranting of dictators such as Hitler and Putin threatening apocalyptic war if they do not get their way and the scheming of their respective propaganda outfits, alongside their clearly stated intentions not to be satisfied with compromises.