Note: In Swedish, the Hellíconia trilogy was published as six books. This is part three of those six, consisting of about half of Helliconia Summer.

When I read Helliconia the first time around as a teenager, halfway through this one is where I dropped out. I remember being put off by the humans from the observation station Avernus in orbit around Helliconia coming down to the surface of the planet. And while I still feel that Billy Xiao Pin is an extremely irritating character in his clumsy and unpsychological way of shoving science in the face of the Helliconians, I can now see the point of Avernus. There's an interesting tension between a world where religion prevails (even though Aldiss' rants against gods are sometimes tiresome) and the people watching it, so immersed in theory they hardly believe in reality at all anymore. I think it actually spices things up a bit.

Helliconia is a very well-constructed world, a planet where the seasons are thousands of years long, with cultures rising and falling every year, complete with wildlife, geography, geology and competing cultures. This is it's strength and it's weakness. For while Helliconia is a very interesting place to visit, putting the world in itself in the front seat gets in the way of the storytelling. This feels very much like a braod chronicle, never quite letting you get emotionally involved with it's many characters. A big minus for the unrhythmical and often plain wrong translation, too. I'll surely read the whole series this time, but it doesn't blow me away. ( )