Foreword

Going Forth is a sequel to Pawns. When I planned Pawns and started to write it in the late 1970s, it was, I thought, a complete story in itself. I still think it is. But while I was completing Pawns in 2014, Going Forth began to form in my mind.

You could read Going Forth as a story in itself, I suppose – but I think it would be much better to read Pawns first.

A different leg of the trousers of time?

After I planned Pawns and wrote half of it, it languished for over thirty years. At first I considered updating the first half to take account of changes in the world in the meantime, but quickly realized that it wouldn’t work.

So Pawns’s leg of the trousers of time had diverged somewhat from ours.

Going Forth is much further still down that other leg of the trousers of time.

Spelling of place names

There are quite a lot of real place names in Going Forth that are not spelt the way they usually are nowadays. They’re spelt the way they were spelt in the big 1983 Times Atlas that Pete, Persie and Merly found in Pawns.

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