Helliconia Spring
Brian W. Aldiss
Helliconia Spring has one of the more interesting settings I've read in a long time. The planet is in such an orbit around the two suns that the great majority of its solar year, which is many hundreds of years long, is spent far away from heat, so it's an arctic wasteland with rare bits of dirt. There is a brief period of time when the planet enters its "Spring". Life (aside from the sentients, but I imagine that's discovered in later books) has developed for exactly this elongated pattern. Plants and animals stay dormant for incredible periods of time, massive changes occur, things just plain get weird. The nifty part is that the people haven't any real clue what's happening -- just that the snow is going away and weird animals are coming round to visit. Every Spring, they have to reinvent society. I guess that's one way to do it. Aldiss is a skillful writer and I enjoyed reading Spring. I look very much forward to making it through the rest of the year.
