This is a book that I read a loooong time ago and came back to a generation later. It's a really original series (or was at the time) and the writing and imagery is quite beautiful. The bones are science fiction, but you have to go through lots of layers and pages to see that. The atmosphere is fantasy. It's the original "winter is coming" series, with winter lasting aeons and spring a miracle. The gender issues are quite dated and fall into the range of problematic. It's a bit psychedelic.

Spring:
There’s a strong similarity among Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg, and Brian Aldiss. They all use formal, sometimes stiff, language, and all describe odd, extreme characters and behaviour. Yet I’m a huge fan of Vance, lukewarm about Silverberg, and find that I don’t much care for Aldiss.

I’ve always accepted of Aldiss as one of the masters of the field, and for many years didn’t realize how little his books had actually affected me. It wasn’t until I read and heartily disliked Finches of Mars that it really hit home. So, when the chance came up to read the Helliconia trilogy, I decided to make it a definitive test. Based on book one, Aldiss fails.

The characters have little depth, and no real spark, and not solely because the book covers long time periods. Aldiss seems constantly to forget that we’re looking for story here, not just scholarship. It is interesting to see the balance of powers shift as the world emerges from the ice, and to see Aldiss’ careful delineation of economic, spiritual, and scientific development – but it’s only intellectually interesting. Only rarely did I find my emotions involved, my interest truly engaged by any of the players. While there’s a lot to work with here – especially relations between humans (an emerging power) and phagors (who prefer the cold), but to Aldiss they seem to be little more than fodder for his intellectual treatise. He creates some strong characters, but then does little with them.

Altogether, I found the book very slow going. The dense socioeconomic exploration got in the way of story, and the cold characters impeded the flow of the thought experiment. In this first book, at least, Aldiss’ great experiment is not a success.

Summer:
After the sweeping, Michenerian scope of the Spring volume, Aldiss tries hard to bring the story to a human scale in Helliconia Summer. He frames the story with an abandoned queen, pining for her cruel husband, and he comes back to her occasionally and toward the midpoint of the volume. But it’s an artifice that is only partially successful. There’s not enough foundation for the queen’s situation to support the groaning, top-heavy mass of social and historical commentary that burdens the first half of the book.

More successful is the introduction of an outside observer. Billy Xiao-Pin, from the Avernus orbital station. His presence seemingly forces Aldiss to stick more close to a limited range of time and space, making the story both easier and more interesting to follow. Even when Billy is out of the picture, the story stays close to its other lead characters, and in particular King JangolAnganol, a tragic figure all of whose options are bad.

The result is a slow, but still much more intimate and entertaining book than its prequel. While first half is slow, the second begins to fulfill the promise that Aldiss must have hoped for with his reams of setup and background in the Spring volume. By the end, one feels somewhat satisfied – much the feeling of finally reaching “Of Beren and Luthien” after plowing through the duller bits of Tolkien’s Quenta Silmarillion.

Winter:
In Helliconia Winter, Brian Aldiss finally settles into the human-scale story he approached in Summer. The result is, if not exactly intimate, still substantially more engaging than the previous volumes. Winter is coming, and with it the Fat Death, the plague that kills some and transforms others to prepare them for centuries of cold ahead.
It’s hard to say that any of Helliconia’s characters is particularly likeable, but they are, at least, interesting. There’s more action and less philosophy here. Enough of the secrets of the world are revealed for the content to be satisfying, though some of the mechanisms lean toward the arbitrary.

To be frank, my reaction on finishing the series was mainly of relief. It’s seldom that I find books this slow. Mainly, I think the issue is that Aldiss, lost in the vast scope of his plan, forgot to approach it through characters we could identify with. That gradually improved as the trilogy progressed, but even in this last volume, I didn’t care enough about the lead protagonist, Luterin Shokerandit, to have strong feelings about what happened to him. While an improvement on its predecessors, Winter is not a strong book.