As a little act of personal homage, I’ve just started rereading the late, great Brian Aldiss’s “Helliconia” trilogy. If you’re unfamiliar with it, this series of classic science fiction novels describes, over a period of around a thousand years, the lives of the inhabitants of the distant planet of Helliconia: these constitute humans (though the products of an entirely separate evolution to us), large sentient goat-like creatures called phagors and various “protognostics”, these being pre-human primates from whom the humans have evolved but with whom they continue to share the planet.

Helliconia orbits the star Batalix, but six million years previously to the events narrated in the books (which themselves occur 6000 years in the future) the Batalix system was itself drawn into orbit around the much brighter and hotter supergiant star Freyr. This binary system means that Helliconia experiences a short year of 480 days as it orbits Batalix, but also the “great year” of Batalix and Helliconia’s highly elliptical orbit round Freyr, which lasts 2,600 Earth years. Consequent to this lies the planet’s bizarre ecology, biology, climate and cultural development, with the humans evolving from primitive hunter/gatherers to early modernity each great year with the advent of Spring, before being cast back into the condition of brute survival once Freyr winter arrives. At which point the phagors become, once again, the dominant species.

On top of all that, all these events are observed from the Earth Observation Station Avernus which orbits Helliconia like a tiny moon. Helliconia is the only planet in the galaxy discovered by us Earthlings to host life beyond the microbial, although the existence of the Helliconia virus, borne by the ticks which infest the phagors’ shaggy pelts and essential to the planet’s humanoid ecology, means no human from Earth can set foot on the place with dying within weeks. Instead, Helliconia’s unfolding history is transmitted across the cosmos and is then watched a thousand years later on Earth, Helliconia thus unwittingly becoming interwoven with the fate of all of us.

This brief outline only hints at the scope of Brian Aldiss’s imaginative achievement in the Helliconia books: together, in the way great Science Fiction writing can, they constitute one of the most thoughtful reflections on history, politics, destiny, ecology and philosophy of at least the last 50 years. What he also creates is a sobering sort of perspective orrery, focussing one moment on the deeply personal and individual before pulling back to encompass the literally universal. If you’ve never read them, I cannot recommend these books highly enough.

And apart from anything else, they should serve to distract you from what’s going on all around us right now.

From decades of careful observation of the political class, albeit mostly at a fairly distant orbit for the sake of my sanity, it’s obvious that politics has always attracted a small but significant percentage of individuals who, in adherence to papal orthodoxy, abjure Galileo’s heretical ideas and believe the sun orbits round the Earth. Trouble is they then launch into error in their firm belief that the Earth then orbits round them. Theresa May is merely an extreme example of the type, though it’s fairly worrying that she also happens to be the Prime Minister of our country.

With Aldiss’s brilliant cosmological creation in mind, it’s clear that the extraordinarily powerful gravitational pull exerted by May’s sense of self-belief – that she is uniquely gifted in wisdom and political skill – has wholly blinded her to observable, objective reality. That said, her failure to admit her failings is systemic. While the Tory Party no longer orbits round her, Britain no more orbits round the Tory Party than the World orbits round Britain. None of these truths, however, appear to have broken through to most of the Tories or their leader, who remains in office with the dynamism and nimbleness of a mummified Stalinist despot in a granite mausoleum.

This Tory astronomy – which is more akin to astrology – which also seeks to pull us away from the orbit of the World’s richest trading bloc and seal us off from all of the World’s other people, is now solipsistic in its delusional selfishness. As Britain cascades towards national catastrophe simply, it seems, to stop some starry-yet-swivel eyed borderline fascists in the Tory Party and their media megaphones from screaming and screaming until they’re sick, the rest of everything carries on nonetheless: the wider orbits persist in their revolutions, while we will fade away into irrelevance.

Part of me wants to see this through to the end, so the truths are so overwhelming even the Tories will be compelled to concede that they’re nothing more than a cavalcade of cranks, careerists, chancers and charlatans. If only we had the comfort of observing it from a thousand light years’ distance, rather than huddling amidst the Tories’ wreckage.