Helliconia Spring cover art

Helliconia Spring

The Helliconia Trilogy, Book 1

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Helliconia Spring

By: Brian Aldiss
Narrated by: Keval Shah
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This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy—a monumental sage which goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers. An entire solar system is revealed, and with it a world disturbingly reflecting our own, Helliconia: an Earth-like planet where dynasties change with the seasons. Events and characters and animals stream through this gigantic novel. Cosmic in scope, it keeps an eye lovingly on the humans involved. So the 5,000 inhabitants of the Earth's observation station above Helliconia keep their eyes trained on the events of Oldorando and may long to intervene though the dangers are too great. So we on Earth have them all in our vision in one of the most consuming and magnificent stories of scientific romance.

©1982 Brian Aldiss (P)2025 Tantor Media Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Space Opera Solar System
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The narrator completely spoils the book. Aldiss' grammar is great but, the narrator pauses in all of the wrong places and destroys the flow.

Awful Narration

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I bought the Helliconia books when they first came out and loved them. I wanted to revisit that pleasure by listening to audiobook versions. Unfortunately the narrator’s voice and delivery make it very hard for me to go on. Is the voice AI-generated or just that of a fluent and confident human being who somehow can’t pronounce ordinary words like ‘towards’, or ‘sow’ (pig) and uses unwanted pauses and incorrect sentence stress?

A great story spoilt by bad narration

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An amazing construction of an ecology based on the astronomy of Helliconia’s system threaded with the story of the twin civilisations.

The greatest of all sci-fi epics

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An interesting idea, upended by an emphasis on endless description, rather than plot and engaging dialogue.

But even then, ruined by a narration with certain words always mispronounced, which jars, and removes you from the story even more.

How difficult is it to pronounce the word 'towards'? Alas, this word crops up a lot... It is not 'to-words'. Begorrah!

And as mentioned by others, pauses is odd places.

I won't be listening to any more of this series, and certainly not this narrator.

Unfortunately dull, and with terrible narration.

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