Name: Inverted World
Author: Priest, Christopher

Cookies on The Best Science Fiction Books

We use cookies that are essential to run the site. With your permission we also use analytics cookies, to see which lists and books are read, and advertising cookies. You can change your mind at any time with "Cookie settings" in the footer.

Choose your cookies

Strictly necessary Always on

Keep the site working and secure: forms, signing in, protection against forged requests, and remembering your cookie choice. They are set by us (XSRF-TOKEN, the session cookie, and this choice, kept for a year).
Analytics Show us which lists and books are read, so we can improve the site and suggest books you may like. Ours: visitor_id (a year) and visitor_session_id (until you close the browser). Google Analytics, through Google Tag Manager: _ga and _ga_* (up to two years).
Advertising Let Google's advertising tags, loaded through Google Tag Manager, measure and personalise the adverts you see (for example _gcl_*, up to three months). Nothing from this category is set unless you tick it.

When you follow a link to Amazon, Amazon sets its own cookies under its own policy.

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.