CHRISTOPHER PRIEST 1943-2024
Remembering the dreamer of the Archipelago
“I CAN NO LONGER TAKE A PLOT seriously enough to go with it as a bare plot,” said novelist Christopher Priest in 1995. “I’m always thinking: where’s the flaw in this, where does the idea leak? Unreliability soon starts creeping in, and I cheer up no end.”
An expert in subversion, Priest dealt in delusions and misrememberings, taking readers to sideways worlds and dislocated realities. Born in Cheadle, Cheshire, he grew up reading science fiction but always resisted being boxed in by the genre. Part of the British New Wave literary scene, his contemporaries included JG Ballard, an admitted influence on his own slippery narratives that teased and pushed the possibilities of mainstream fiction.
Priest’s first short story “The Run” was published in 1966. Two years later he left a career in accountancy to write full time. Debut novel Indoctrinaire (1970) was followed by Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972), establishing his fascination with a fragmenting near-future Britain, a theme further explored in 1977’s A Dream Of Wessex.
Priest would, in time, build a canon of stories around the Dream Archipelago, the unmappable realm of scattered islands that so perfectly defined his spirit as a writer.
1976’s The Space Machine: A Scientific
Romance was an ingenious mash-up of HG Wells’s The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds while 1995’s The Prestige, the story of rival Victorian illusionists, was later adapted for the big screen by Christopher Nolan. In 2002 Priest won the Arthur C Clarke Award for alternate history WWII tale The Separation. His final novel, Airside, was published in 2023.
Remembering the creation of 1974’s Inverted World, Priest shared what might well have been the secret to all his writing: “What I had to do is creep around the idea and take it by surprise.”