Christopher Priest | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

SFF Author: Christopher Priest

(1943- )

Christopher Priest also writes in other genres. He lives in Hastings with his wife and twin children. The Prestige own the World Fantasy Award in 1996. Learn more about his novels at Christopher Priest’s website.

A Dream of Wessex: Explores the meaning and perception of reality

A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest

Written in 1977, Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex stands at the midpoint of media questioning reality. Falling on the tail end of Philip Dick and his oeuvre’s continual exploration of metaphysical meaning, A Dream of Wessex is also an (unheralded) fore-runner to science fiction featuring uncertain realities that followed in the 1990’s. Many ideas that are exploited in films such as The Matrix or Inception can find their conception in Priest’s tale of a scientific experiment into alternate realities.

The Affirmation: Literary science fiction does not get much better

The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

I’ve heard Christopher Priest’s 1981 novel The Affirmation described as regressive, an ouroboros eating its own tail, a Moeibus strip. While there is undoubtedly an M.C. Escher quality to the book — a blurring of reality — the beginning and end are simply too different to form a contiguous whole reverting back on itself. They’re opposite ends of a spectrum in fact, and the appeal of the novel is immersing one’s self in the subjective reality Priest slowly unwraps and getting lost in the world of memories as a result.

The Prestige: Haunting and thought-provoking

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

I was drawn to Christopher Priest’s novel after having watched and enjoyed the Nolan brothers’ film adaptation of The Prestige. Going into the reading, I knew that several plot twists would be spotted a mile away, but the film is sufficiently different from its source material that Priest’s work contains several surprises.

Journalist Andrew Westley is brought under false pretences to a Derbyshire estate to meet with a young woman who is quite desperate to get in contact with him.

Magazine Monday: Interzone, Issue 248

The September/October 2013 issue of Interzone opens with “Ad Astra” by Carole Johnstone. A married couple has been sent together to the explore the solar system, all the way out to Pluto and back. After years of travel together with only each other for company, they barely speak to each other, though they still have sex very frequently — sex that seems more like battle than love. They’ve been steadily absorbing radiation, and the narrator, Lena, carries out monthly medical checks on them, growing increasingly concerned at the exposure levels.

SFF Author: Christopher Priest

A Dream of Wessex: Explores the meaning and perception of reality

The Affirmation: Literary science fiction does not get much better

The Prestige: Haunting and thought-provoking

Magazine Monday: Interzone, Issue 248

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