GaryC wrote: Sat Feb 03, 2024 9:04 am
Christopher Priest, aged 80. A leading writer in British SF from the 1970s, his novel The Prestige (winner of a World Fantasy Award) was filmed in 2006. The link is to the blog of his wife, Nina Allan (who is a friend of mine).
Oh no. While some of his recent work descended into an unaccountable crankery, he was still producing arresting sci-fi stories of indeterminacy, unreliability, and intersecting realities, many set in his beguiling invention, the Dream Archipelago. In particular, his 2016 novel
The Gradual was one of the most original time travel novels ever written, and his 2013 novel
The Adjacent is perfect in its refusal to bring its proliferating strands, timelines, and realities into a graspable whole, instead letting them just lie adjacent to each other for the reader to organize how they wish (in this, he's the anti-David Mitchell, who works towards ever larger structures of coherence where Priest seeks decoherence). Even his 2020
The Evidence managed to be an intimate portrait of the effects of the financial crisis within a bizarre, unaccountable cosmic mystery.
Unfortunately, Priest had adopted an interest in conspiracy theories in the last five years, leading him to produce a couple of undercooked novels that seemed only bare skeletons on which to hang these unpersuasive ideas. 2018s
An American Story engaged in a 9/11 trutherism weird in a Brit, and 2022s
Expect Me Tomorrow advanced the idea that, while climate change is real and will have brutal consequences, there's a chance that the beginning of another ice age will mitigate its worser effects. I dunno. These novels advanced the idea that there were secret truths, but I don't go to Priest to be told what the truth is, I go to him for the limits of what we can know, the difficulties and ambiguities behind things. There were seemingly two Priests these last few years, but following each weak conspiracy book would be a genuine Priest novel. I haven't yet read his latest, and I guess last work,
Airside, but it'll be a bittersweet experience now.
If anyone's looking to get into Priest, which I heartily recommend (especially for fans of Christopher Nolan and Cronenberg's
eXistenZ), here are some of his best:
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Inverted World: a more conventional sci-fi story about a city that has to keep in perpetual motion. You can see him start to engage in what would become preoccupations, the distortions of perception and the unreliability of narrators, within an idiosyncratic but still recognizably sci-fi story.
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The Affirmation: Someone once described this as two funhouse mirrors looking at each other. It's here that Priest abandoned traditional sci fi for his own strange thing, still sci fi adjacent, but not sharing any of its conventions or typical interests. Here, indeterminacy and unreliability reign, and there is no hope of untangling anything as this odd, unsettling novel pings between its two narratives: a troubled young man in our world writing a strange manuscript, and a young man in a strange world who is about to undergo a procedure that grants immortality, but at the same time wipes out a person's memories, so he must write a manuscript describing his life. Whose manuscript are we reading?
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The Adjacent: his best novel, and one that marked a change in his preoccupations from the indeterminacy of perception to the indeterminacy of possible realities. Set partly in a future Britain that has become an Islamic theocracy at some unstated point, but also in other, seemingly unconnected time lines including WWII (where a magician accompanies H. G. Wells to the front). A terrorist attack that kills a photographer's wife sends him on a strange trip involving a new tech called adjacency technology, and which seems like it might connect adjacent realities to each other. Brilliant in its refusal to make explicit connections between its parts, relying rather on suggestion and the reader's need to find coherence amidst all the destabilization.
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The Dream Archipelago: a series of short stories set in Priest's fictional world of the same name (and which appears in two other novels in this list). All the stories are worthwhile, but a couple of the longer ones are astonishing in their ability to undercut your assumptions about reality. They're also good preparation for Priest's other books set in the Archipelago, of which there are at least 5.