Sunday, June 5, 2016

Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Book Review:'Helliconia Spring' by Brian Aldiss
2 / 5 Stars

‘Helliconia Spring’ first was published in hardback in 1982; this Berkley paperback (433 pp) was released in November, 1984. The cover artist is uncredited.

‘Helliconia Spring’ is the first volume of the trilogy; later volumes are ‘Helliconia Summer’ (1983) and ‘Helliconia Winter’ (1985).

[During the 70s and early 80s, lengthy novels were a linchpin of general fiction publishing; 600+ page tomes from James Michener (Centennial, Chesapeake) and James Clavell (Shogun) were bestsellers. Science fiction came rather late to this aspect of publishing, with Dune (1965) and Dhalgren (1975) the only representatives, until the advent of the early 80s, and ‘Helliconia Spring’.]

The premise of the Helliconia series is straightforward: the planet circles its two binary suns at a leisurely pace; so leisurely, in fact, that a ‘year’ is equivalent to 2,592 days, and winter lasts for the equivalent of nearly 600 Earth years. The ecology of Helliconia is thus geared towards enduring, and then exploiting, protracted periods of cold and dark followed by abundant sunshine and warmth.

The human inhabitants of Helliconia (their presence on the planet is never explained, but they are presumed to have evolved from a race of Helliconian primates known as ‘protognostics’) share the planet with a humanoid race of goat-people called phagors; there is frequent enmity between the two races.

Winter life for the humans on Helliconia is nasty, brutish and short. Technology is at the bronze-age level, and misery and squalor are simply facts of existence.

Much of the narrative of 'Helliconia Spring' deals with the lives of the people of the village of Oldorando, who live in ignorance and superstition among the ruins of a previous civilization - one established centuries ago during the Great Summer, only to disintegrate with the coming of the Winter.

The main plot revolves around the personal melodramas and political conflicts of a large cast of characters, who must struggle with the psychological and social traumas triggered by the massive environmental changes accompanying the advent of Spring. An overarching plot device deals with the impending arrival of a large phagor army, whose leader seeks to burn Oldorando to the ground.

The events of the main narrative are regularly interspersed with pedantic expositions on the environmental science of Helliconia, and its plant and animal life.

I found ‘Helliconia Spring’ to be ponderous and unrewarding. The plot had just enough momentum to keep me from tossing the novel aside due to boredom, but that’s it’s only saving grace.

The book is badly overwritten; much of Aldiss’s prose has the self-conscious leanings of an author who is determined to be ‘literary’:

A heat message thrilled along the five hundred-mile length of the glacier, as it spilled down from the airless plateau of High Nktryhk to the excoriated valleys east of the Oldorandan plain, drawing out ancipitals from its eaves and crevices.


Using ‘excoriated’ to describe a valley is just one of the steady stream of thesaurus-derived, awkward phrasings that mark the prose style of ‘Helliconia Spring’. Readers will need to gird themselves to encounter such words as ‘eotemporal’, ‘ripicolous’ (or 'rupicolous'), ‘hypogean’, ‘expatiate’, ‘renasence’, ‘exsiccated’, ‘obtend’, and Aldiss’s favorite adjective, ‘cthonic’.

I can’t help comparing ‘Helliconia Spring’ to another high-profile 80s sf trilogy: Harry Harrison’s ‘Eden’ series, which started just two years later, in 1984. 


Harrison’s trilogy is just as ambitious as Aldiss’s in terms of its creation of a planetary ecology, and the maintenance of a complex cast of characters. But the quality of Harrison’s prose, and the overall readability of the ‘Eden’ trilogy, markedly are superior to ‘Helliconia’.

Summing up, only die-hard Aldiss fans are going to want to invest the time and effort into reading ‘Helliconia Spring’ and its sequels. All others can pass on this title. 

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Captain Sternn

Captain Sternn
by Berni Wrightson
from Heavy Metal magazine, June 1980

One of the best comics to appear in the early issues of Heavy Metal magazine was 'Captain Sternn: Featuring Hanover Fiste', by Berni Wrightson, that appeared in the June, 1980 issue. its eight pages combine brilliant artwork with an offbeat plot that keeps the reader guessing till the very last panel.

Captain Sternn is - outwardly- the epitome of the clean-cut, morally upright hero, but as the story unfolds the satiric humor underlying his depiction gradually is revealed. 

The artwork has a dynamic quality that I've yet to see equalled in any of the comics I have read in the 36 years since the strip first was published. 

Here it is: Berni Wrightson's 'Captain Sternn'.









Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Freejack issue 3

Freejack
Official movie adaptation
Issue 3, June 1992
Chuck Dixon and Clint McElroy (writers), Ernie Stiner (pencils), Tony De Zuniga (inks)
NOW Comics


Thursday, May 26, 2016

Book Review: Omha Abides

Book Review: 'Omha Abides' by C. C. MacApp


2 / 5 Stars

‘Omha Abides’ (160 pp) was published in 1968 by Popular Library. The cover artist is uncredited.

Carroll M. Capps (1917 – 1971) published a number of sf novels and short stories during the 1960s.

‘Omha’ is set in the USA, more than 1,000 years after a race of humanoid aliens called the Gaddyl have conquered Earth, and turned it into one giant wildlife refuge. A network of Gaddyl outposts scattered across North America serve as hunting lodges for parties of Gaddyl tourists from off-world. These tourists are eager to conduct big game hunts in comfort and style aboard hovering aircars; their prey are mutated lineages of terran animals, as well as creatures introduced from other worlds ruled by the Gaddyl.

Mankind endures as bands of stone-age tribesmen who rove the forests, plains, and mountains, curiously gazing at the crumbling ruins of human civilization.

Murno, a middle-aged woodsman, is one of the human slaves working on the Gaddyl settlement in what used to be San Francisco. As the novel opens, a new Gaddyl overseer has made life even more difficult for the slaves, and when his actions trigger a revolt, Murno realizes that all the slaves, not just the rebellious ones, will be caught up in the brutal reprisals sure to follow.

Murno and his family embark on an arduous trek East, where, according to rumor, tribes of humans are able to live unmolested in vast tracts of wilderness rarely disturbed by the Gaddyl. But Murno makes a fateful decision early in his trek: he agrees to take possession of a highly secured artifact – a ‘disruptor’ that creates the hyperspace portals allowing rapid transit between the worlds of the Gaddyl federation. 


Murno promises to bring the disruptor across the Rocky Mountains to the unknown lands of the Burnies, where, it is said, an ancient entity called 'Omha' resides. Omha, so the legends say, is the last, best of hope Mankind has to defeat the Gaddyl and retake possession of the Earth.

But when the Gaddyl learn that Murno has a disruptor, they will spare no effort to find him…………and a desperate chase is on across the strange territories that make up the western half of the USA.

‘Omha Abides’ is a straightforward sf adventure novel; the narrative is constructed around an extended chase sequence, one in which our hero Murno engages in running battles with his alien pursuers. In the course of his trials he is aided by various tribes of outlaws and races of mutated humans.

While the opening chapters of the novel are reasonably engrossing, somewhat inevitably, the middle segment of the book tends to drag. The action does pick up in the final 15 pages, with some genuinely suspenseful sequences, but these are deflated by a contrived ending that doesn't deliver much in the way of surprises.

Summing up, ‘Omha Abides’ isn’t a particularly imaginative novel; Carol Capps never was a participant in the New Wave movement that marked the genre in the late 60s, preferring instead to stick to the conventional narratives that - presumably - had a more marketable character as far as paperback publishers were concerned. But if you are fond of those types of stories from that era of sf, then this one may be worth picking up.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Freejack issue 2

Freejack
Official movie adaptation
Issue 2, June 1992
Chuck Dixon and Clint McElroy (writers), Ernie Stiner (pencils), Tony De Zuniga (inks)
NOW Comics