Christopher Priest
Science fiction and fantasy author whose novel The Prestige was made into a Christopher Nolan film
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST, who has died aged 80, was one of Britain’s leading science fiction and fantasy authors, although that hardly conveyed the variety and originality of his work – as he was the first to insist.
Priest’s early novels, including The Space Machine (1976), an exuberant pastiche of HG Wells, and Inverted World (1974), set in a mobile city called “Earth” on a planet colonised by humans, were classics of science fiction. However, his later books and short stories, often set on a vast chain of equatorial islands known as the Dream Archipelago, were less easily categorisable and baffled many SF enthusiasts.
“My problem is that I came into serious writing from the wrong direction, from science fiction,” he observed in 1990. “The trouble with writing the kind of stories that interest me now is that you end up being made to bear the burden of the preconceptions people have of them.”
The best-known of his later books was The Prestige (1995), a tale of two stage magicians in Victorian England whose rivalry leads one of them to invent a teleportation machine. It was both an ingenious yarn and a minutely researched history of the art of prestidigitation, and in 2006 was filmed by Christopher Nolan, with Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine and David Bowie.
The book also received the James Tait Black Prize, Priest being a rarity among genre writers for the esteem he enjoyed within the literary establishment. In 1983 he was one of the elect on Granta’s generationdefining list of the 20 best British writers under 40. But he displayed little gratitude for being elevated to the literary elite and wrote an article in The Bookseller scorning the whole exercise as a gimmick.
Over the next four decades he rarely missed an opportunity to knock the work of his fellow nominees Ian Mcewan (“he has an unoriginal mind and an unadventurous approach to fiction”), Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, who observed after one such broadside in 1993 that “Priest always was a chippy bugger.”
Priest had high standards and saw no reason not to publicly criticise those who failed to meet them. Although he admired the film of The Prestige, he made no secret of his disappointment in Christopher Nolan’s subsequent career. “He’s sold out – sold out to Batman! – and that’s a great, great tragedy. He could have been the new Hitchcock,” Priest told The Daily Telegraph in 2020.
As a reviewer of SF and fantasy he gave no quarter to books he disliked even if they were written by friends. But it was a tribute to his essential decency and loveability that he never lost a friend by doing so.
Christopher Mckenzie Priest was born in Cheadle (then in Cheshire) on July 14 1943, the son of Walter Priest, an executive in a company that made weighing machines, and his wife Millicent (née Haslock).
He left Cheadle Hulme School in 1959 and worked, as he put it in Who’s Who, in “junior clerical posts”, while writing short stories for magazines such as Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. He became a full-time writer in 1968 and in 1970 published his first novel, Indoctrinaire, an apocalyptic tale set, prophetically, in a future in which the Amazon rainforests have been destroyed.
Much of Priest’s later work, including such novels as The Affirmation (1981), The Extremes (1998), The Separation (2002) and The Islanders (2011), was far more cerebral and inward-looking than conventional SF. Favouring troubled narrators whose version of events often turns out to be at odds with the truth, he repeatedly pursued the theme of the unreliability of memory and the precariousness of sanity.
“Priest has put difficulties in the way of his own career by not wishing wholeheartedly to write SF – or, for that matter, non-sf,” his friend and mentor Brian Aldiss observed in his memoirs. “He has developed an arid mindscape of his own.”
To keep afloat without compromising on the idiosyncrasies of his fiction, Priest wrote pseudonymous novelisations of films and ghosted the memoirs of the Olympic athlete Sally Gunnell.
His work was always revered in the SF community, however, and he won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel an unmatched four times.
Tall with a bookish stoop, Priest lived in Devon for much of his life, but latterly, despairing of England after the Brexit vote, moved to the Scottish island of Bute. His 18th novel, Airside, was published last year, and in his final months he was working on a biography of his friend JG Ballard while being treated for cancer.