The last is a knowing concretization of the title story of Jorge Luis Borges's El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (coll 1942), whose maze or labyrinth branches not spatially but through Alternate-World pathways in Time. Further mazes in this sense include the subset of floor-tiles which must be trodden in the proper order to avoid death in Walter M Miller's "It Takes a Thief" (May 1952 If vt "Big Joe and the Nth Generation" in The View from the Stars coll 1965), the Pattern in Roger Zelazny's Science Fantasy Amber sequence opening with Nine Princes in Amber ( 1970), the shifting shadow-maze of Gene Wolfe's "A Solar Labyrinth" (April 1983 F&SF), and Destiny's garden in Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel Season of Mists (graph 1992). Even traditional hedge-mazes like Hampton Court's in London do not offer serious physical barriers thus the narrator of Alasdair Gray's Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (1979 Words Magazine 1995 chap) chooses not to play, stepping over the inches-high hedge. The archetypal maze was a two-dimensional pattern, often cut in turf, to be traversed voluntarily as a kind of ritual Game. Labyrinths and mazes have a long history, and distinctions between them have long been blurred.
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