Helliconia

This is a very interesting and thought provoking book. However I felt that it would have been better packaged as two, perhaps even three short novels. Avoiding spoilers, the three sections (as I see them), are as follows:

Part 1 (**): “The Prelude” that actually takes up about a third of the book. This follows a young hunter as events lead him through a frozen world and is a fascinating look at how a human culture could survive in such conditions.
Part 2 (***): A look at how a small community adapts to warming weather and changing conditions. Quite interesting.
Part 3 (**): This reads like a pretty standard fantasy story involving a minotaur attack but with rather wooden characters.

The key strength of the book is the way it treats the landscape as a character. This is at it's fullest in the first section. Mr Aldiss creates a detailed, beautiful and deadly environment that I fell for hook, line and sinker.

Unfortunately the greatest weakness of the book is the weakness of it's characters. As the weather warms Mr Aldiss brings his characters increasingly to the fore and their two dimensional nature becomes more significant. While at the start the cinema screen of the mind is treated to a vast vista with our little character struggling through it, by Part 3 we have an extreme close-up of our hero, and the mahogany expression is all too apparent.

Repeatedly a situation would become really interesting and I would think, now things are going to get exciting! Only to have the dispassionate narrator state something along the lines of:"..of course [character A]'s plans came to nothing. 1500 miles to the east a short man stubbed his toe. This seemed of no importance to anyone but him. 600 years later nations would fall. To the north a bird laid an egg. Meanwhile back in the town [character A] had been married for 6 months and her mother had died... This got frustrating.

When this book is good, it is very very good. When it is weak (I'm sorry to say) it was rather boring.