Where Time Winds Blow

I find myself reminded of Le Guin, and I see her praise marketed on his works. Both share a sensitive intelligence and an emotional concern for the worlds they build and the characters that inhabit them. On display in Time Winds, at least, there is also a Taoist substrate mixed with clear allusions to Hindu custom. That said, Holdstock cannot quite be compared with Le Guin.

Leo Faulcon is a freelance “rifter” on the planet Kamelios — also known as VanderZande’s World — where a preternatural phenomenon is the subject of wide-scale research efforts to understand the origin and purpose of the time winds. These winds are a destructive and violent force that blast through the valleys below the rift, leaving a residue of time artifacts in their wake. Around this central premise, a small ensemble of characters find their lives propelled by a strange subservience to the planet’s six shifting moons and the hyperphysical entity they believe controls the winds.

Holdstock borrows the conceptual design of Lem’s Solaris — the inability of man to communicate with the other — but Lem was speaking to the death of knowledge itself, which reaches significantly beyond the intellectual rapport Holdstock musters here. There are also clear borrowings from Priest’s Inverted World, as the characters inhabit a moving city that shifts along a rift to avoid the time winds in the valley. Holdstock has clearly read and appreciated Ian Watson and D.G. Compton as well.

Holdstock’s mystery is somewhat artificial — though I recognize that all plots are artificial. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I grew increasingly aware of his characters as pawns being ushered along a series of manufactured plot devices. He cannot quite keep up with himself: there are memorable ruptures in the lives of his characters that feel hastily sutured as the story moves to its next episodic lattice.

On the credit side, the world-building is often gorgeous, if largely borrowed, and Holdstock is a competent writer. I also appreciated the fact that he never strawmans his characters: when he raises philosophical arguments, he makes a genuine effort to challenge them. Time Winds is a well-conceived science fiction novel. I simply suspect, based on the talent visible here, that he has done better elsewhere.