"I have a function, like the village cobbler, and that is to tell stories. Everything else is subservient to that." Although he makes no lofty claims for himself in the note he writes for John Rowe Townsend's A Sounding of Storytellers (1979), Peter...

Peter Dickinson categorizes his special brand of mystery as science fiction with far more fiction than science. When he imagines the closed world of a classic detective story, he tries to invent it as if it were an alien planet. The result is a...

"The only thing we may predict about Peter Dickinson is that his next book will always be unpredictable," concluded a Junior Bookshelf reviewer. Although the reviewer referred to Dickinson's books for children, the same may be said about his equally...

DICKINSON, Peter. The ropemaker. Random House, Delacorte. 375p. c2001. 0-38573063-2. $7.95. JS* O happy reader who is just now discovering Peter Dickinson! Every book he writes--whether a mystery for adults or a story for young people--possesses an unforgettable voice, a distinctive setting,...

It is difficult to imagine an author better equipped to discuss the differences between writing for children and adults than Peter Dickinson. Since 1968, nearly every one of his elegant, unusual mysteries for adults has been followed, in fairly short order, by a...

Peter Dickinson's first three children's books, The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children, form a trilogy. They are all set in a Britain chronologically of the near future yet also of the past, for the 'Changes' have taken place, causing the country to become an island

… fragmented into a series of rural communities, united by a common hostility to machines of any sort and by a tendency to try to return to the modes of living and thought th...

The classic journey-adventures of the past, from [Frederick] Marryat and [Walter] Scott downwards, have most of them been journeys of body and spirit together: the most stringent and compelling accidents have their full effect when we can see how they have changed the protagonist other than by merely breaking his head. The divagating and dangerous journey taken [in Tulku] by Theodore Tewker into Tibet is, to outward appearance, a flight; surviving a Boxer raid on his father's mission in China, the bo...

Peter Dickinson [is] a comparatively new writer whose stories about 'The Changes', a time when men in England had learned to fear and dread machines, and so destroy them, have been one of the most refreshing discoveries of the last few years. (p. 124) The first of these three books, The Weathermonger, is a straightforward and vividly exciting adventure story. The Changes have only affected Britain; Europe is still as she was, but she cannot mount a rescue expedition because, for reasons which ...