Helliconia Winter

After becoming an unlikely hero in the Oligarch's war, only to be betrayed by the Oligarch, the son of the Keeper of the Great Wheel tries to make it home to be under his father's protection.

The third installment is set in the northern lands as the leaders prepare for the oncoming winter. There is more political strife and competition as the leaders struggle to decide on the appropriate way to prepare, falling eventually on authoritarianism and bigotry, and making a series of judgements counter to our understanding of the natural functioning of Helliconia.

The story includes the lands and the people where the Great Wheel is located, along with the Great Wheel itself, so it's good that that got included after so many references to it.

Unfortunately, the characters aren't amazing, and the big reveal isn't particularly surprising. I found it hard to empathise with the main character, and I don't think he "grew" at all in the story. The main supporting character was basically caught in the flow of the story with no free will at all.

The space station again has no bearing on the main storyline and the planet, but the book includes many pages of descriptions of it sliding into chaos and becoming defunct, and also parts of what was happening on Earth and to others who headed into space. I call these descriptions as that is what they are written as; they are a fast-forwards description of the main historical points and can't really be called a story. There is precisely one point that is made in these descriptions that has a connection to Hellonica and that clears up precisely one outstanding plot point. The rest really isn't needed.

Aldiss includes his trademark bizarre sexual references by having the humans on the space station undertake cruel perversions and use genetic modification to create oversized living autonomous genitalia. It has no bearing what so ever on what else is happening. It's just weird.

With the onset of Climate Change this book could be read as a challenge to us not to allow authoritarianism and bigotry to take over and to respect our planet, but actually it just says "there will always be survivors", which isn't particularly useful or deep.