HOLDSTOCK, Robert P(aul)

(1948-)

   UK writer with an MSc in medical zoology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He spent 1971-4 in medical research before becoming a full-time writer, though he had published his first story, "Pauper's Plot", for NW as early as 1968. He wrote much of his short fiction in the following years. Among the more notable stories are the novelettes "Travellers" (1976), a TIME-TRAVEL tale, and "The Time Beyond Age" (1976); others are collected in In the Valley of the Statues(coll 1982). After the mid-1970s his writing broke into two superficially incompatible categories. Under the house names Ken BLAKE and Richard KIRK, and as Robert Black, Chris Carlsen, Steven Eisler and notably Robert Faulcon, he published (see listing below) at least 20 novels,novelizations and works of popular sf "nonfiction", almost all of them hasty commercial efforts but infused, nevertheless, with a black intensity of action that gave even cliched SWORD-AND-SORCERY plots something of a mythic intonation. At the same time, under his own name, he began to publish sf novels like Eye Among the Blind (1976) and Earthwind (1977), in both of which he uneasily attempted to accommodate the compulsive mythologizing of his dark fantasies to "normal" sf worlds. The result was a series of books whose narrative energies seem hampered by decorum: the interplay between ALIENS and alienation in Eye Among the Blind is effective but ponderously expressed; Earthwind utters slow-moving hints at the powers of a "chthonic" atavism; and Where Time Winds Blow (1981), the best of these early books, ornately but without much movement posits an environment suffering arbitrary transfigurations through time-shifts.With the publication of Mythago Wood (1984), however, RH's two careers suddenly and thankfully converged in a tale whose elaborate proprieties of rationale are driven by narrative energies and an exuberance of language previously restricted in crude form to his Berserker novels, written as Chris Carlsen. Much expanded from his short 1981 fantasy of the sametitle, Mythago Wood is FANTASY rather than sf only if it is wrong to consider the creation of a rational model for conceiving racial archetypes a proper subject for sf. The frame of the tale is indeed obdurately rational, and the "mythagoes" discovered - and transmuted - by the contemporary protagonist are appropriate expressions of what might be called the unconscious tale of the race: they are that tale made animate, and each mythago bears a name or names - and enacts the nature - of those archetypes that embody, for Britons, the permutations of that tale. The wood from which they come - like the interior lands for which the protagonists of much UK fantasy long - is huger inside than out, and in describing it RH engages in language of a metaphoric density rarely encountered in marketable fiction. The book won the 1986 World Fantasy AWARD. Its sequel, Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988), onlyincreases the intensity of the cooperation between rational discourse and Sehnsucht (a term C.S. LEWIS employed to describe the melancholy longingfor "something that has never actually appeared in our experience", and by which he meant to designate the impulse behind certain kinds of fantasy). The longing of the protagonists of Lavondyss to enter the "unknown region"where archetypes shape themselves into the human story is absolute, and it gives the book much of its potency as an explication of mythopoeisis. Several of the stories assembled in The Bone Forest (coll 1991) serve aspendants to the central novels; and The Fetch (1991), a fantasy, traverses similar terrain. In transforming the Matter of Britain into archetypal sf, RH has re-assembled old material, and old generic devices, into a newterritory for fiction.

   JC

   Other works: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1978), Consultant Editor; Necromancer (1978), paranormal horror; Elite: The Dark Wheel * (1984 chap), novella based on a computer game; Bulman * (1984) and One of Our Pigeons is Missing * (1984), associational tv novelizations; The Emerald Forest * (1985), novelizing the John Boorman film.As Ken Blake (house name): Cry Wolf * (1981), The Untouchables * (1982), Operation Susie * (1982) and You'll be All Right * (1982),associational titles in the The Professionals series.As Robert Black: Legend of the Werewolf * (1976) and The Satanists * (1977), bothnovelizing films.As Chris Carlsen: The Berserker series, comprising Shadow of the Wolf (1977), The Bull Chief (1977) and The Horned Warrior (1979).As Steven Eisler: The linking texts for 2 vols of reprinted illustrations,being Space Wars Worlds and Weapons (1979) and The Alien World (1980).As Robert Faulcon: The Night Hunter sequence, comprising The Stalking (1983)and The Talisman (1983), both assembled as The Stalking (omni 1987), The Ghost Dance (1984) and The Shrine (1984), both assembled as The GhostDance (omni 1987), and The Hexing (1984) and The Labyrinth (1987), both assembled as The Hexing (omni 1988).As Richard Kirk (house name): Swordsmistress of Chaos * (1978) with Angus WELLS, writing together asKirk, A Time of Ghosts * (1978) and Lords of the Shadows * (1979), being titles in the Raven series.Nonfiction: Alien Landscapes (1979), Tour of the Universe: The Journey of a Lifetime - The Recorded Diaries of Leio Scott and Caroline Luranski (1980), Magician: The Lost Journals of theMagus Geoffrey Carlyle (1982), Realms of Fantasy (1983) and Lost Realms (1985), all written with Malcolm EDWARDS, all primarily picture books.As Editor: Stars of Albion (anth 1979) with Christopher PRIEST; the Other Edens series of original anthologies, all with Christopher EVANS, comprising Other Edens (anth 1987), Other Edens II (anth 1988) and Other Edens III (anth 1989).

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; DEVOLUTION; GOTHIC SF; MYTHOLOGY; NEW WRITINGS IN SF.