Introduction: Into the Wood

Abstract

The novelette of “Mythago Wood” was published in 1981 and expanded into a novel in 1984. It is the only work to have received the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award both for short fiction and for novel. This chapter examines the work in the context of Holdstock’s earlier fiction, in particular looking at the way ideas about the unreliability of time and the inescapable influence of the past developed as themes that would run through all of his work. These themes were most fully expressed in the novel Where Time Winds Blow and “Mythago Wood”, both of which appeared in 1981, in which more or less the same ideas were expressed in one case in the language of science fiction and in the other in the language of fantasy. It was the use of fantasy that made this a radically different and profoundly influential work.