Christopher Priest (novelist)

Christopher Priest (born 1943) is an English writer, whose notable works include Inverted World, Fugue for a Darkening Island (US title Darkening Island), The Prestige, and The Separation.

Many of his works could be classified as science fiction. Priest's work often features unreliable narrators, and thereby raises questions about narrative, truth, and the nature of memory and reality.

A film of his novel The Prestige is currently in production by director Christopher Nolan.

Works

One of his early novels, The Affirmation, is about a traumatized man who flips into a delusional world in which he experiences a lengthy voyage to an archipelago of exotic islands. The state of mind depicted in this novel is remarkably similar to that of the delusional fantasy-prone psychoanalytic patient ("Kirk Allen") in Robert Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour or Jack London's tortured prisoner in The Star Rover.

Priest also dealt with delusional alternate realities in A Dream of Wessex in which a group of experimenters for a British government project are brain-wired to a hypnosis machine and jointly participate in an imaginary but as-real-as-real future in a vacation island off the coast of a Sovietized Britain.

Awards

His novels have won the BSFA award (three times), the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He has also won the BSFA award for short fiction, and been nominated for Hugo Awards in the categories of Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Non-Fiction Book (this last for his The Book on the Edge of Forever (aka Last Deadloss Visions), an exploration of the famously-unpublished Last Dangerous Visions anthology).

Bibliography

• The Run, (ss) SF Impulse, May 1966 [Volume 1 Number 3]
• Conjugation, (ss) New Worlds, #169 December 1966
• The Ersatz Wine, (ss) New Worlds, #171 March 1967
• The Match, (ss) Tit-Bits, 11 November 1967
• Occupation Force, (ss) Tit-Bits, 25 November 1967
• The Haul [with Dick Howett], (ss) Tit-Bits, 31 August 1968
• The Interrogator, (nv) New Writings in SF 15, editor John Carnell, London: Dobson, 1969
• The Perihelion Man, (nv) New Writings in SF 16, editor John Carnell, London: Dobson, 1969
• Breeding Ground, (ss) Vision of Tomorrow, January 1970
• Double Consummation, (ss) The Disappearing Future, editor George Hay, Panther, 1970
• Fire Storm, (ss) Quark/#1, editor Samuel R. Delany & Marilyn Hacker, Paperback Library, 1970
• Nothing Like the Sun, (ss) Vision of Tomorrow #10, July 1970
• Indoctrinaire, (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1970
• Real-Time World, (nv) New Writings in SF 19, editor John Carnel, London: Dobson, 1971
• Sentence in Binary Code, (ss) Fantastic, August 1971
• The Head and the Hand, (ss) New Worlds Quarterly 3, editor Michael Moorcock, London: Sphere, 1972
• The Inverted World, (nv) New Writings in SF 22, editor Kenneth Bulmer, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973
• Fugue for a Darkening Island, (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1973
• Transplant, (ss) Worlds of If, January/February 1974
• A Woman Naked, (ss) Science Fiction Monthly, v1 #1 1974
• The Invisible Men, (ss) Stopwatch, editor George Hay, New English Library, 1974
• Inverted World, (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1974
• Men of Good Value, (ss) New Writings in SF 26, editor Kenneth Bulmer, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1975
• The Space Machine, (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1976
• A Dream of Wessex (US title The Perfect Lover), (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1977
• The Cremation, (nv) Andromeda 3, editor Peter Weston, London: Futura, 1978
• The Negation, (nv) Anticipations, editor Christopher Priest, Scribner's, 1978
• The Watched, (na) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1978
• Whores, (ss) New Dimensions 8, editor Robert Silverberg, Harper & Row, 1978
• Palely Loitering, (nv) The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1979
• The Agent (with David Redd), (nv) Aries 1, editor John Grant, David & Charles, 1979
• The Miraculous Cairn, (nv) New Terrors #2, editor Ramsey Campbell, London: Pan, 1980
• The Affirmation, (n.) Faber and Faber, London, 1981
• The Glamour, (n.) Jonathan Cape, London, 1984
• The Ament, (nv) Seven Deadly Sins: A Collection of New Fiction, editor anon., Severn House, London 1985
• The Quiet Woman, (n.) Bloombury, London, 1990
• The Book on the Edge of Forever, (n.f.) Fantagraphics, Seattle, June 1993
• In a Flash (from The Prestige), (ex) Interzone, #99 September 1995
• The Prestige, (n.) Touchstone, Simon and Schuster, London, 1995
• Impasse, (sss) SF Impulse, #12, February 1997
• I, Haruspex, (ss) The Third Alternative, #16 1998
• The Extremes, (n.) Simon and Schuster, London, 1998
• The Equatorial Moment, (ss) The Dream Archipelago, Earthlight, 1999
• eXistenZ, (n.) Harper, 1999
• The Cage of Chrome, (sss) Interzone, #156 June 2000
• The Discharge, (ss) SciFi.com Website 13th February 2002
• The Separation, (n) Scribner, 2002

Trivia

Comic writer Jim Owsley changed his name to Christopher Priest in the mid-1990's, apparently unaware that there was already a successful writer by that name. In order to reduce confusion, the front page of Owsley/Priest's website points to both his and Priest's webpages with a clear delineation of which Priest is which.

Christopher Priest wrote the tie-in novel to accompany the 1999 David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ, the theme of which has much in common with some of Priest's own novels, most notably A Dream Of wessex and The Extremes.

External links

• Christopher Priest's web site
• His story "The Discharge" at Sci Fiction
• 1995 interview by David Langford,includes brief summaries and comments by Priest on most of his novels to date.
• His Guest of Honour speech at the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention