Helliconia Spring (The Helliconia Trilogy)
Language: English
Pages: 532
ISBN: 1497637635
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Helliconia follows an eccentric orbit around a double-star system with a twenty-six-hundred-year cycle of very long seasons. As spring slowly breaks the brutally long winter, humans emerge from hiding and a long sequence of civilization and growth begins to repeat again, unbeknownst to the participants but watched by an orbiting satellite station, Avernus, created by Earth some centuries ago. Humans free themselves from slavery to the aboriginal Phagors, and religion and science flower and expand.
Brian W. Aldiss has, for more than fifty years, continued to challenge readers’ minds with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive fiction. Helliconia Spring’s prescience with regard to climate change is nothing short of extraordinary.
Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch, Book 2)
The Mote in God's Eye (CoDominium; Moties, Book 1)
Geister des Krieges (Perry Rhodan Neo, Band 35; Vorstoß nach Arkon, Band 11)
Angriff der Posbis (Perry Rhodan Neo, Band 115; Die Posbis, Band 5)
dress her offspring in one. They competed with each other for brighter skins. Blue, magenta, aquamarine, cherry. They blackmailed the men in ways men enjoyed. They preened themselves, they stained their lips. They paraded. They dressed their hair. They even took to washing themselves. Correctly worn, with those electric stripes running vertically up the body, hoxney skins could make even a dumpy woman look elegant. The skins had to be properly cut. A new trade prospered in Oldorando: tailor. As
up his disaster from inside him. Strangers passed him, their belongings loaded on an archaic sledge. An old man, helping a child along, called to him, “The fuggies are coming.” He heard the sound of people running behind him—the mob, avenging. There was one place he could go to for refuge, one person, one hope. Cursing her, he ran to Vry. She was back in her old tower. She sat in a kind of dream, aware—and frightened of her awareness—that Embruddock was moving to a crisis. When he hammered on
make a bit of difference. You’re not unpresentable yourself, now I come to look at you. How did you get to be a priest?” Sensing the turn of the tide, he hesitated, then said boldly, “I killed two men.” She seemed to spend a long while regarding him from under her thick eyelashes. “Wait there while I pack a bag and a strong bow,” she said at last. The collapse of the roof had sent an anxious excitement through Pannoval. The event most dreaded in popular fancy had occurred. Feelings were
slow, had ever managed to tickle girls. One of the corpsmen continued the story. The elders and the old shaman of the lakeside tribe met together to decide how Dresyl and Yuli should be punished for their lechery. Some spat anger when they spoke, because in their hearts they were jealous. Others spoke piously since, being old, they could follow no course but virtue. (The storyteller laid this simple wisdom on thick, and assumed a piping voice, to make his audience laugh.) Condemnation was
on the roof. Behind everybody, the kaidaw carcass roasted, untended; its flavours mingled with wood smoke to fill the bowl of the square, full of upturned faces. A second cheer, louder than the first, arose when the phagor chief was dragged into view, black against the sky. “Throw it down!” screamed the crowd, united in hate. The monstrous chief fought with his jostling captors. He roared as they prodded him with daggers. Then, as if realising that the game was up, he jumped up onto the parapet
