Inverted World

Author: Christopher Priest

He had reached the age of 650 miles. With its very first words, Inverted World tells us we are in a very different world. In fact, this is one of the great unique inventions of science fiction. Helward Mann, who is 650 miles old, lives on Earth. But Earth is a city set on rails that must forever move forward. Ahead is a spike that rises to infinity, and anyone who gets too far forward of the city finds themselves becoming elongated. Behind them is a flat, featureless plain where every feature they have passed, every person they have passed, is squashed smaller and smaller. Only by staying at optimum can the city avoid either fate, but since the ground is constantly moving, they have to keep the city moving too, taking rails from behind and repositioning them ahead of the city so that regardless of the obstacles they can trundle a few precious yards further forward.With incredible skill and grace, Priest very gradually reveals the truth about this hyperboloid world, providing at the very end a twist makes us re-evaluate every single thing we think we have learned. Inverted World won the BSFA Award. It's a novel that is universally recognised as being breathtakingly original and leading to a devastating psychological breakthrough. After reading this, you'll never see things the same way again.

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The Dream Archipelago is a sequence of novels and stories connected only by their setting, and by the powerful psycho-sexual charge they have. Priest's work has consistently undermined our notions of reality, demonstrating that our conceptions of the world around us are built on shaky foundations. And that is particularly true in these very different works. The Dream Archipelago is a chain of islands that stretch right around the equator. The countries in the northern continent have been at war for centuries, but they fight all their battles in the uninhabited southern continent. The islands of the Dream Archipelago provide a neutral zone, a place for leave (with prostitutes and police all over the place), for runaways, for tourists. But the sexual allure of the islands is matched by dangers. The stories collected in The Dream Archipelago explore that, while the novel The Affirmationmatches someone suffering psychosis in this world imagining the Dream Archipelago, and someone in the Dream Archipelago imagining this world. The Islanders,which won the BSFA and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, is a gazetteer of the Dream Archipelago, with stories of horror and murder and sexual infidelity hidden within it. Most recently, The Adjacent describes war from 1914 through the Second World War and on to the near future, but it concludes with its varied recurring characters brought together in the Dream Archipelago.

The Prestige, which won the mainstream James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the World Fantasy Award, is about two rival stage magicians at the turn of the twentieth century, whose rivalry turns deadly and, through the effects of a machine invented by Nikola Tesla, goes on to affect their descendants down to the present day.