Wednesday 14 June 2017

Seasons Last 1000 Years

It has been a wee while since I posted about "The City Shining...", my (although I should really say our, since so many commenters on the blog and on G+ have contributed to its evolution) campaign setting in which a day lasts 100 years.

As a reprise to those posts, I have just finished a book which may be relevant to your interests - Helliconia Spring, by Brian Aldiss. I had never even heard of this book (part of the "Helliconia" trilogy) until I happened across it in a second-hand book shop a few months ago; I find this beyond surprising, because it is in a strange way a masterpiece of the SF/Fantasy genre.

I say "in a strange way" because the book is flawed - it is granite-hard to get into and the plot moves like a glacier. But simply as a vision it is sublime: a world in a binary star system which orbits one star while that star orbits a much larger one. As the planet comes closer to the larger star, the seasons rapidly warm up, and rapidly cool down as it moves away. In other words, each season lasts over 1000 years. Entire civilizations are formed in spring, rise to their apogee in summer, then die off in winter leaving only ruins behind.

As a description of a fantasy world I can think of few parallels; the planet of Helliconia is itself a character and the extended lyrical sections in which the changing of the seasons is described are stunningly good (they remind me of Kim Stanley Robinson's descriptions of the first explorations of the poles of Mars in Red Mars, still for me probably the tour de force in SF imaginative writing). The book is also notable for having an opening prelude of nigh-on 100 pages set entirely underground - Veins of the Earth, eat your heart out.

Well worth checking out and eminently gameable - nay, crying out for licensing and turning into a campaign setting. The PCs start off at the very turning of winter into spring, going out into the newly thawing wilderness and uncovering the remnants of lost civilizations from the previous summer - as well as weird and wonderful new civilizations being founded in their place. Great stuff.

9 comments:

  1. Summer is my favourite of the trilogy, there's a bit more characterisation alongside the worldbuilding. (Currently reading The Dragon Griaule)

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    1. Cool. I am taking a bit of a break to re-read LOTR now and then going back to Helliconia Summer after that.

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  2. Many nights would be bright as well - a star of some great luminosity being in the distance.

    Certainly intra-apocalyptic is just as interesting if not more so than post-apocalyptic.

    With the right rules, maybe Pendragon? you could play a dynastic campaign where each generation plays out in a gaming session.

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    1. Yes, there are interesting details about how day and night are also affected.

      "Intra-apocalyptic" is a good coining!

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  3. I read this as a teenager and found it kind of cool but as you say hard to get into. I then reread the whole series as an adult, ironically stumbling across them in a library sale where they were going for AUD$1 each. The planetary seasons was a definite thing that echoed from previous reading and I loved the Fat Death and the Skinning Disease that sweeps the land before the switch. The other thing that resonated were the alterations in the political landscape, i.e. cities/states becoming more powerful/weaker as weather conditions changed. Not sure how you would model that in your City Shining campaign but it would go with the 100 years in a day theme.

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    1. The main issue with the campaign would be that over the course of a year not much would change. Things would be reasonably static. I wonder if there is some way to map the world out and say "At dawn it's like this, at mid-morning like this, at noon like this..." etc.

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  4. You should check out "The Three Body Problem" by Lui Cixin. It's new SF, pretty good, and deals with some interesting star system challenges.

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  5. Um..."winter is coming?"

    Personally, I like extended cycles/seasons more when they bring bizarre dangers and weirdness...like McCafferey's Pern books.
    ; )

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    1. Loved those books as a kid but they really have not aged well...

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