Helliconia Winter

Brrr!

This one was seasonally appropriate; I mostly read it while curled up in my blankets at home, wishing that it were summer already. But circumstances interrupted, and I wasn't able to finish it until recently, out here.

Brian Aldiss' Helliconia is a planet whose seasons last for several centuries. In that sense, it's conceptually similar to George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series. But the resemblance pretty much ends there: in Martin's series, the extended seasons are a background detail which may or may not ever come up again; in Helliconia Winter, the change of seasons is the whole thrust of the plot.

The tone is dry and somewhat anthropological; there are several interesting characters, but the real appeal of the novel is seeing how society adapts to a seasonal change that they don't even have the records to remember; and then noting the hints that all of these changes are part of an ecological balancing act. Helliconia's humans seem to be "wired into" their planet's ecology in a much more direct way than Earth humans.

There are apparently two more novels: as you might expect, they're named "Helliconia Spring" and "Helliconia Winter." When I get home, I'll probably have to look them up.