Malik wrote:Well, I believe it's impossible to duplicate a person (much less a soul), but this is science fiction!
Quite true! I
love Christopher Priest's science fiction from Indoctrinaire, The Inverted World, The Dream of Wessex straight through to The Affirmation. When I saw this title I knew I would love this film. Beautiful movie! I don't think you can compare this to The Illusionist, both great in their own right. The Illusionist is more of an impressionist painting...The Prestige was more of a very well concieved film. And true, bad accents in TI but I missed a few things Bale was trying to say too. The below should probably be in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi forum-but I posted this a long time ago in Gen. Sci-Fi at the Hangar>if you haven't read Christopher Priest, you should-The Inverted World catapulted me into Sci-Fi, and then Dune did the rest...
BLUFF YOUR WAY AS A PRIEST EXPERT!
by David Langsford 1995
INDOCTRINAIRE (1970)
Slightly abstract and surreal tale about a chap held prisoner in a version of Brazil. The most memorable sf plot device is the `live' hand growing out of a table which, during interrogations, points at our hero in a fearfully menacing way.
Priest: "It was a period. There are a couple of good bits, but unfortunately I can't remember what they are."
FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND (1972)
Disorienting cut-up-and-reshuffled narrative of nasty events in an England swamped by African refugees from a nuclear war. At the time our author was dead proud of having slipped a rogue piece into the jigsaw story, one that doesn't actually fit anywhere.
Priest: "The first book of mine about someone who misremembers things. This has become something of a theme, based on one of my own failings. Another period piece, this is the one novel of mine where one hostile review wiped out any cheerful thoughts I ever had about the book, and I haven't been able to look at it since."
INVERTED WORLD (1974)
This world really is inverted, geometrically transformed from a sphere to a hyperboloid whose equator and poles taper off to infinity (which makes Larry Niven's Ringworld look a bit puny, though later on it was topped by mathematically "bigger" infinities in Rudy Rucker's White Light). Across the distorted surface trundles a whole city on wheels, fleeing disaster.... Mindboggling stuff, shortlisted for the Hugo award.
Priest: "The best opening sentence I ever wrote (even better in French!), and in the middle of the book is the best sf scene I ever wrote. I dined out on these two bits for about ten years after the book came out. I wouldn't be able to write Inverted World now, because I'd be too inhibited and self-conscious."
REAL-TIME WORLD (collection, 1974)
Uneven collection of early stories, with two interestingly prophetic items: the grisly `The Head and the Hand', starring a performance artist who chops bits off himself before huge audiences, and the title story with its foreshadowing of later Priest preoccupations.
Priest: "This book happened because Inverted World did well. To be frank, I think it was too soon to put together a collection. But scarcity has its own dynamics, and the hardback has become by a long way the most collectable of my titles."
THE SPACE MACHINE (1976)
A cheery romp: a gentle pastiche of H.G. Wells which begins with the assumption that The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine were episodes in the same alternative history, and helpfully fills in several gaps. Much of the action takes place on Mars, and we finally learn how the Martian invaders launched their capsules....
Priest: "I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one, probably more than I should have done. For me it represents a kind of personal peak, because I wrote it in an extrovert mood during a happy period of my life, at a time when I wasn't too broke, and I was not yet feeling held back by other people putting labels on me. Everything went smoothly until publication day, when the Observer memorably observed, `Three hundred pages of homicidal tedium', since when I have written in a state of politically correct humility."
A DREAM OF WESSEX (1977)
marketed in the US as Dream Lover
The sf gimmick is predicting the future (or at least, a self-consistent possible future) by consensual hallucination in a kind of cyberspace. But the personalities of certain experimenters overshadow mere logical extrapolation....
Priest: "This novel represents a kind of valediction to trad sf, because it explicitly describes the process of futuristic imagining, then subverts the whole business. It has recently been described as the novel that predicted virtual reality, but that's because whoever said it hadn't spotted the subversion."
AN INFINITE SUMMER (collection, 1979)
A mixed bag of atmospheric short stories. Besides the much-anthologized title piece this includes "Palely Loitering" (a BSFA Award winner) and the Hugo-shortlisted, TV-adapted novella "The Watched".
Priest: "Another chunk of mid-1970s Priest, a bit raw in places, a bit soppy in others, but with a particular mood throughout that I haven't caught since."
(An Infinite Summer and The Affirmation centre on the "Dream Archipelago" venue; two more published stories with this setting exist, "The Cremation" and "The Miraculous Cairn" -- not collected with the others except in translated omnibus editions published in France and Germany. Priest: "I have been secretly hoping I might one day get a British or American publisher to do the same, but would want to rewrite all the stories first.")
THE AFFIRMATION (1981)
Indescribable. Read it! As one reviewer (oh all right, Ian Watson) noted, this book -- which only seems to end abruptly in mid-sentence -- can be re-read with a new understanding as its own sequel.
Priest: "The first of the novels to make a deliberate effort to deal in a new and realistic way with stock sf ideas: in this case, immortality. The whole novel, from beginning to end, subverts reader expectations: everything is unreliable. As a result I think The Affirmation has the best overall plot I ever wrote, and also the best and most surprising plot revelation ... on the other hand I think it has rough edges, caused by my being a bit nervous about what I was up to."
THE GLAMOUR (1984)
H.G.Wells's invisibility is physical: light somehow passes undisturbed through the invisible person. G.K.Chesterton's psychological invisibility (see his Father Brown story "The Invisible Man", which Chris insists he's never read) applies to people and things you don't notice, can't take in, have forgotten even though they're in plain sight.... The Glamour passes through this territory and goes far beyond.
Priest: "Another go at a stock sf theme: this time invisibility. Again, nothing about the novel can be trusted. I look back on this book and enjoy the plot, and the strength of the central metaphor (invisibility = memory loss), but once again I feel uncomfortable with certain short passages. The Glamour was once spoken of as a major Hollywood `vehicle' for Barbra Streisand and Christopher Walken, a fact which ten years later still has the power to make my goolies shrink in horror."
THE QUIET WOMAN (1990)
A deceptively understated tale whose backdrop is a withering extrapolation of Thatcherite excess: the media prevented from reporting the awkward fact of Southern England being partly radioactive, the barely restricted power of a now-privatized Military Intelligence, and worse.
Priest: "BBC-TV got hold of this one, dramatized it into a three-parter, hired a director, recce'd the locations ... then did nothing until the contract expired. I was sorry about this, because apart from the obvious benefits of having a book on TV, I was dying to see how they would work out the story. This has an anti-plot: on the surface it's a story of a woman surviving a nuclear accident, but as soon as you delve into it nothing is certain any more."
THE PRESTIGE (1995)
The Victorian era: and two stage magicians are deadly rivals leading strangely parallel lives. Each has his own unique version of a major magical illusion; each is baffled by the other's method; the two different secrets go beyond mere mirrors and trapdoors to be the central defining and distorting factor in their owners' lives. Compulsive stuff.
Priest: "The newest one, and therefore still a favourite. I think for the time being I'm too close to it to have any idea how it fits in relation to the others, but the usual Priest stuff about misremembering is in there, and a plot with many intricate developments. This novel, with Space Machine, is the most widely researched of my books. I must by now know more about magic than most people, but I still don't understand how tricks are done ... even when I find out."
danlo's note-Little known facts: Mr. Priest wrote a number of Dr. Who episodes and is close friends, and biographer of Harlan Ellison.
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