VANSITTART, Peter

(1920-)

   UK writer best known for his densely written historical novels. His first novel, I Am the World: A Romance (1942), generalizes its politically speculative plot by placing it in an allegorized and unnamed country, where a dictator creates an ambiguous UTOPIA; The Game and the Ground (1956) covers similar territory. The Story Teller (1968) offers nosf explanation for the longevity of its central character - who lives over 500 years and the stages of his life are analogous to the development ofnorthern European civilization - but the novel's narrative and linguistic powers deserve notice from the sf readership. In 3 further novels of IMMORTALITY - Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981) and Parsifal(1988) - which share a polymathic density of language and a complexly ambiguous mythopoeic attentiveness to the cultural icons of their titles, PV again provided models of human history as a sequence of incessantlyreiterated tales whose casts, although they may metamorphose, do so only to return. Robin Hood in particular prefigures the entangled chthonic worlds of sf fantasists like Paul HAZEL and Robert P. HOLDSTOCK.

   JC

   Other works: The Dark Tower: Tales from the Past (coll 1965) and The Shadow Land: More Stories from the Past (coll 1967), juveniles which retell mythsand legends of Britain.