Robert Paul Holdstock
 

(1948 --)
 
 


 

Robert Holdstock was born in 1948 in Kent (East of the Medway). Part of his childhood was spent exploring the dense woods of the Kentish heartlands and also the bleak expanse of the Romney Marsh. He spent nine years as a full-time student, and holds a masters degree in Medical Zoology. In 1976 he became a full time writer. Currently, he lives in London.
He received British Science Fiction Award, World Fantasy Award as well as Homer Award

He is most famous thanks to his Mythago Series:

        Mythago Wood (1984)
        Lavondyss (1988)
        The Bone Forest (1991)
        The Hollowing (1993)
        Merlin's Wood (1994)
        Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997)
        Gate of Ivory (1998)


Holdstock is often interested in the nature of time. In one his early novel, Where Time Winds Blow (London: Pan Books, 1981, 1982) he pictures a planet where eerie time displacements, like winds, can dump alien artefacts from the past and future into now, or sweep things away from now into anywhen. A planet that attracts both scientists and fortune hunters, rummaging among the strangenesses, risking oblivion, carrying with them their own hang-ups, desperations, odd urges and searches.

A quotation from the Mythago Series:

"All of the entries of Huxley's journals, convoluted and confused as they were at times, related to manifestations of mythological creatures and heroes that my father called myth imagoes or 'mythagos' (I shall keep the man's eccentric spelling of the coined word).
The 'forms' of these mythagos, he believed, arose in Ryhope Wood as a result of being seeded by the human minds close by. They would first appear at the edge of vision, in the peripheral area of awareness where imagination and reality co-exist in shadowy tension. But the very fact that they could be glimpsed here, haunting ghosts, vague, startling movements seen from the corner of the eye, meant that in the deeper forest they were being given form, and life, and certainly a past . . . a history and a role in myth, born with the solid flesh, and a life that functioned in prehistoric times, perhaps. They could arise time and time again, conforming to memory and legend in many ways, but utterly unpredictable. And dangerous."
 

(Robert Holdstock: "Gate of Ivory", Voyager (HarperCollins) 1998, p. 36-37)

A quotation from his last book,
first book of "The Merlin Codex" Series, Celtika (Simon and Schuster, 2001)

"The moon sat full and low between the headlands. It had been there for hours, unmoving, as if caught in time.
The only sign of change in the silent harbour was the restless ebb and flow of the dark sea against the harbour wall and the lines of tethered galleys. Tisaminas didn't understand what was happening.
'If only Antiokus was here,' he murmured ... 'He could explain this. Time has slowed...' "

(Robert Holdstock, Prologue to Celtika)
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