Off the (Virtual) Shelf

Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy in omnibus format on Kindle was priced low enough that I went ahead and added it to the library. I've read the first and third books, Helliconia Spring and Helliconia Winter, several times and enjoyed them. My first reading of Helliconia Summer, however, was really more of a skim than a read and it had never set its hook enough to make me want to come back, so I've decided to return to it and give it a fair chance.

The setting of the book is a planet that orbits on the fairly outer edge of the life zone of a dim star. It's naturally an icy, dark place, with a sapient species that sort of resembles upright musk oxen or bipedal yaks. The dim star has been captured into a highly elliptical orbit around a bright supergiant, so that now the planet Helliconia has two "years"; its regular 480-day trip around its own sun, plus the 1,800+ year trip around the big supergiant. During the big year it goes from frozen glacial wasteland to a tropical planet with equatorial temperatures over a hundred degrees small-year-round and then back again.

Oh, and the radiation from the big star caused evolution to run wild on the planet, including among the yak-people's pet monkeys...

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