Brian Aldiss's later career increasingly explored ecology on a planetary scale. Using theories drawn from scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, Aldiss came to see planets as living, self-regulating organisms, that fundamentally shape human existence.
In the early 1980s, Aldiss embarked on his most ambitious project to date, the Helliconia Trilogy. The three books imagine a planet in a binary star system with seasons that last hundreds of years. Each season drastically reshapes the environment and so human society on the planet.
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Each book in the trilogy follows the social and biological changes that overcome humanity during one season.
In Helliconia Spring (1982) the narrative follows the emergence of human society from a centuries long winter over a number of generations. Helliconia Spring (1983) by contrast concentrates on a few years of political intrigue between competing human empires at the height of summer. Finally, Helliconia Winter (1985), set at the end of autumn, charts the changes to humans and human society as the planet phases into winter once more.
The covers of the Heyne Bücher German language editions of the trilogy (1990) form a single continuous landscape when laid side-by-side showing the shifts in climate between seasons.
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In the Helliconia Trilogy, Aldiss created a richly imagined planet with an eco-system adapted for extreme changes in climate.
In Helliconia Winter, Aldiss included appendices to help readers understand the complexity of the planet's biological and cosmological systems. Aldiss also included in the novel for the first time a map of Helliconia drawn by his wife Margaret Aldiss.
This copy of the original map shows the three huge continents of Helliconia and the major settlements mentioned in the books.
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To create a convincing world for the Helliconia Trilogy, Aldiss consulted with scientists with specific expertise, including Peter Cattermole, Lecturer in Planetary Geography at the University of Sheffield and Iain Nicolson, an Astronomer based at Hatfield Polytechnic.
A letter in the archives from Aldiss consulting Nicolson on a date for the setting of Helliconia Winter also asks for approval for the 'Jim Lovelace [sic] Gaia drift of my argument.' Aldiss here refers to the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock in conversation with Dian Hitchcock that argued that Earth was a self-regulating system akin to a lifeform.
The Gaia hypothesis underpinned the trilogy with its insistence that the planet of Helliconia itself regulates life on its surface like an organism regulates its body.
Aldiss explored similar themes of a planetary scale in his late work White Mars (1999) written in collaboration with the mathematician Roger Penrose.
The novel follows the first research team sent to Mars. Cut off from Earth, they set up their own utopian society based on cooperation. Central to the story is the discovery by the scientists that the largest geological feature on Mars, Olympus Mons, is in fact an enormous intelligent lifeform. The harsh atmospheric conditions of the planet have encouraged Martian life to form one large symbiotic whole. Here Aldiss builds on the work of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis who argued that symbiosis between organisms is as important as competition in evolution.
In White Mars biological cooperation of Martian life serves as a model for the social organisation of the scientific community. The colonists favour cooperation over competition, which they extend to the planet. They refuse to undertake actions, such as mining or construction, that would harm the Martian environment.
The title of the Italian translation, Marte, Pieneta Libero (Mars, Free Planet) emphasises this aspect of political freedom and the autonomy of nature. The English title White Mars is itself a response to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars (1992-1996)) that imagines the terraforming of Mars.
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The genesis of White Mars can be traced to a pamphlet written by Aldiss in 1997 that launched the fictitious organisation, APIUM (Association For the Protection of an Inviolate and Unspoiled Mars).
The pamphlet demanded that Mars be turned into a protected area for scientific research and tourism in a pre-emptive move to stop colonial exploitation of the planet. Aldiss's pamphlet critically anticipates contemporary colonial ambitions for Mars such as those of Elon Musk. The text of the pamphlet was added to the end of White Mars as an appendix.
Aldiss's final novel Finches of Mars (2013) returned to Mars but on a darker note.
The novel is set on the first human colony on the planet like in White Mars. However, due to the divergence of gravity and environment from Earth conditions, humans are unable to have children.
The title refers to the large number of species of finch found on the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, each adapted to their specific island environment. The implication of the novel, present in the title, is that human life must adapt to the environment, rather than changing the environment to suit its needs. The idea present in Aldiss's earliest writings on science fiction, that humanity is 'governed by its environs' is present once more in his last work.
In a time of climate catastrophe and continuing exploitation of the planet, Aldiss's work asks us to adapt to the world around us rather than to destroy the environment and with it, ourselves.