WHERE TIME WINDS BLOW - Book review

Robert Holdstock’s Where Time Winds Blow was published in 1981 – and on the surface it appears he is still haunted by time-displacement which he wrote about in Earthwind (1977).  

We’re on an alien planet, Kamelios; the planet is quite like a chameleon; for example there are electric storms called fiersig – ‘the power-fields of change, twisted and distorted the stable mind just that little bit more, scarring the mind irreversibly in a way too insignificant to note at the time, but with mounting effect over the months and years’ (p27).

The archaeological team consists of the leader, Lena Tanoway, Leo Faulcon and Kris Dojaan. They can only venture outside Steel City when wearing protective masks. Steel City is unusual – ‘the city rise on its engines, and hover almost silently above the blackened crater that had been home for the last quarter year’ (p31).  [Interestingly, Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2003) concerns mobile cities].

The archaeologists investigate a particular rift valley where time winds blow and a phantom human occasionally lurks: ‘he had been snatched by time and flung somewhere, somewhen, some place and time where he had screamed and not-quite-died... a prison where the walls were centuries, where time itself was his gaoler’ (49). The winds deposited ancient buildings, or futuristic edifices, and then frustratingly swept them all away. These ephemeral deposits draw scientists and fortune hunters – all of whom risk being caught in a time squall and sent to oblivion. ‘Faulcon watched as white towers winked out of existence, to be replaced by moving spiral shapes that radiated redly as they turned... an immense spider’s web of girders was torn from vision, flickering a moment as a time squall knocked it into Othertime and back, and then it was gone and a hideous shape stood there, the carved, gargoyle-decorated gateway of a primitive era...’ (p185).

In the mountains were other humans who had been altered ‘to accept the organic poisons of the world, to be able to see without their eyes melting away, to breathe without corroding the linings of their respiratory tracts’ (p99). The manchanged.

The actual phrase ‘where the time winds blow’ is used on p202.

Holdstock’s world-building is excellent. The characters interact and are conflicted. There’s hubris, cowardice, bravery and (perhaps too much) philosophising.

A rewarding science fiction excursion from a brilliant mind.

And interestingly the prolific Holdstock wrote The Night Hunter series of supernatural thrillers using the pen-name Robert Faulcon!

Editorial comment:

‘Faulcon thought to himself that...’ (p212). Faulcon thought that... is all that is needed!