Post by Yorick on Jul 20, 2024 1:33:54 GMT
I'm so late for this it's devastating. My favourite author is dead. Favourite in the sense of always looking forward to the next book the minute I put down the current one. Christopher Priest died in February this year, real time, but yesterday afternoon subjective time. How could I not know? Over the past several years, it's been my practice to take his new book with me to Cambodia where I often work during the summer school holidays of Australia. I have had his latest (now last!) novel waiting on my book pile since last year, but changes to the Cambodia teaching program meant there was no session this year, though there's talk of projects for next year. So I saved it. Then, an actual vacation (as opposed to a working holiday) window opened up, leading me to central Australia. Thinking about Mr Priest's release schedule, I thought there'd be another one ready to crack open by the next Cambodia trip. So I packed Airside and read it while travelling out to Uluášu, across the desert to Alice Springs, finishing it on the plane just before landing in Sydney. Another satisfying, moving and thought-provoking read - as always. Curious to read reviews and to see if his next book was approaching, I was shocked to see the second Google search being a sad remembrance tribute by a reviewer with whom Priest was acquainted!
So devastated! Sitting in my middle seat on the plane, it was like hearing a relative had suddenly died, made guiltily worse by the belatedness of the knowing. A quick double-check of Wikipedia confirmed it. He died in February after a battle with cancer.
Christoper Priest may be most well known for The Prestige, turned into a typical mind-bender by Christopher Nolan. Believe it or not, the book is even more mind-bending than the film, with an ending that seemed made for Nolan but which he chose to simplify. I remarked at the time to the young woman at the cinema counter that she should read the book as she said that she'd seen the movie - the book's ending is much more disturbing and haunting.
However, his other works are as great if not greater. Reality-twisting rides into uncertainty, the dangers of taking the ground under your feet for granted and giving new scope to the trope of the unreliable narrator. Priest writes books where the narrator is entirely reliable, but a locus to an ever-shifting realscape. Mr Priest must have recognised much in the current state of Midjourney or Dall-e.
I am deliberately not going back and cross-referencing any of the below. Some of these memories are forty years old. I want to recall the emotion of discovery and what has stayed with me, even if I have distorted it into part of my own semi-fictional auto psychology.
My first introduction to Christopher Priest was The Space Machine, a scientific romance in the Wellsian style that mashed up The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds decades before mashups were a thing. Anticipation again! I read this in my teens, in my pretentious Victorian period, if you will, when obsessed with HG Wells, Sherlock Holmes and Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time. What an exciting book to discover at such a time! I still clearly recall the bookshop and exactly where the book was within it. The bookshop (and the building it was in) are now long gone.
I then began to grab everything of his I could find, working through the back catalogue of Fugue for a Darkening Island, A Dream of Wessex and Indoctrinaire. A chance wander in a small used book store (also long gone) put a paperback copy of an anthology, An Infinite Summer, into my hands too: a statue of a nude woman draped over a pedestal graced the cover. Teenage boy, remember? Though looking forward with prurient anticipation to the story from which the picture was derived, it was another short tale that was by far the most charming, most captivating thing I'd ever read up to that time. Palely Loitering takes place in an odd, Edwardianesque future, with an advanced society that had decided to return to a time of formal picnics in the park, a careful pace of life and practiced manners. Picnickers at a specific park are able to take in amusements such as the Yesterday and Tomorrow bridges, where a stream of exotic flux, a byproduct of the launch of a starship some years earlier, allows people to cross one day into the future or past. Perhaps to sample better weather for a Sunday brunch? A young boy, as boys are wont to do, jumps off the bridge to the bank before fully crossing, and the angle of his crossing has him finding himself many years hence, whereupon he becomes enchanted with a young woman sitting by herself. The boy is able to return to his time by replicating the jump and fine-tuning it with repeated crossings of the yesterday bridge, but revisits the woman again and again at key points in his subsequent life, as a touchstone for reality and hope and knowing it's never too late or too soon to change a regret.
Priest was a world-builder too. The Dream Archipelago is a globe-spanning array of island states, each with its own politics, customs and culture, and where time and reality behave in strange and entrancing ways. The novel The Islanders is a kind of travelogue of the Archipelago. The later time-tripping book The Gradual is set there also, where a musician takes a months-long concert tour of the islands, only to find years have passed upon his return because he eschewed a seemingly meaningless ritual of island transit. The Evidence is another.
One of the most trenchant recent works, which I read in a single sitting on the roof of the Seng Hout hotel in Battambang, Cambodia, is called An American Story. It explores conspiracies around 9/11, but more disconcertingly for me, the notion that the democratisation of voice (words out of the mouth of Michael Moore) may harm as much as it liberates. Yes, the gatekeepers have gone (anyone can start a podcast or YouTube channel), but for every teller of truth to power, there's a countervailing conspiracist to drown them out. It's so much harder to dismantle a lie than to utter one. SciMan Dan makes a YouTube career out of debunking flat-earthers, who, thirty years ago, were the fringiest of fringe. Now they have Rode mics, 4K webcams and subscribers and conventions that attract thousands globally. Ha, see what I did there?
One of my favourite of his novels is Inverted World. Decades before Mortal Engines, it follows a scout working for a massive city that must be dragged across the world on tracks to avoid being destroyed. The reason is that the city was once of our Earth but has accidentally been transported to an inverted world where planets are three-dimensional parabolas rather than spheres and where the only place where dimensions are "optimal" for the city is constantly shifting.
For a Star Trek link, Priest write an extensive critique of Harlan Ellison and the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, which has spent more than fifty years in prepublication hell. The essay is entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever.
So now it's over. Another moment when the latest is the last. The latest movie with Robin Williams or Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The latest Kurt Vonnegut book. The latest Bowie song. The minute or two after closing Airside today was the last time I got to enjoy that feeling of pleasure and anticipation. True, Priest was 80, but I think of Shatner and Ken Loach and David Attenborough producing new ventures in their 80s and 90s. And he's been so prolific of late, Priest must have another one about to come out plus others in the planning. So there I was, wondering what was next.
Alas.
There's but one work remaining, a biography of JG Ballard. I might not have otherwise been interested in the life of Mr Ballard, but now I am very much looking forward to holding a new Priest book one last time. I know this is entirely selfish. I'm at that age where, more and more, after a lifetime of companionship, for want of a better word, the latest is the last. Discovering an author relatively early in their career, when they're young and edgy when we like to think of ourselves as young and edgy, and walking with them through the later stages of life, it's like a good marriage. But inevitably comes the separation (another Priest book name) - one partner will more than likely go first.
In the mad, inverted world we live in today, the death of a writer and his departure from the stage is of minor relative consequence. But I mourn his passing and all those anticipations I will no longer have.
Vale Christopher Priest. 1943-2024
So devastated! Sitting in my middle seat on the plane, it was like hearing a relative had suddenly died, made guiltily worse by the belatedness of the knowing. A quick double-check of Wikipedia confirmed it. He died in February after a battle with cancer.
Christoper Priest may be most well known for The Prestige, turned into a typical mind-bender by Christopher Nolan. Believe it or not, the book is even more mind-bending than the film, with an ending that seemed made for Nolan but which he chose to simplify. I remarked at the time to the young woman at the cinema counter that she should read the book as she said that she'd seen the movie - the book's ending is much more disturbing and haunting.
However, his other works are as great if not greater. Reality-twisting rides into uncertainty, the dangers of taking the ground under your feet for granted and giving new scope to the trope of the unreliable narrator. Priest writes books where the narrator is entirely reliable, but a locus to an ever-shifting realscape. Mr Priest must have recognised much in the current state of Midjourney or Dall-e.
I am deliberately not going back and cross-referencing any of the below. Some of these memories are forty years old. I want to recall the emotion of discovery and what has stayed with me, even if I have distorted it into part of my own semi-fictional auto psychology.
My first introduction to Christopher Priest was The Space Machine, a scientific romance in the Wellsian style that mashed up The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds decades before mashups were a thing. Anticipation again! I read this in my teens, in my pretentious Victorian period, if you will, when obsessed with HG Wells, Sherlock Holmes and Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time. What an exciting book to discover at such a time! I still clearly recall the bookshop and exactly where the book was within it. The bookshop (and the building it was in) are now long gone.
I then began to grab everything of his I could find, working through the back catalogue of Fugue for a Darkening Island, A Dream of Wessex and Indoctrinaire. A chance wander in a small used book store (also long gone) put a paperback copy of an anthology, An Infinite Summer, into my hands too: a statue of a nude woman draped over a pedestal graced the cover. Teenage boy, remember? Though looking forward with prurient anticipation to the story from which the picture was derived, it was another short tale that was by far the most charming, most captivating thing I'd ever read up to that time. Palely Loitering takes place in an odd, Edwardianesque future, with an advanced society that had decided to return to a time of formal picnics in the park, a careful pace of life and practiced manners. Picnickers at a specific park are able to take in amusements such as the Yesterday and Tomorrow bridges, where a stream of exotic flux, a byproduct of the launch of a starship some years earlier, allows people to cross one day into the future or past. Perhaps to sample better weather for a Sunday brunch? A young boy, as boys are wont to do, jumps off the bridge to the bank before fully crossing, and the angle of his crossing has him finding himself many years hence, whereupon he becomes enchanted with a young woman sitting by herself. The boy is able to return to his time by replicating the jump and fine-tuning it with repeated crossings of the yesterday bridge, but revisits the woman again and again at key points in his subsequent life, as a touchstone for reality and hope and knowing it's never too late or too soon to change a regret.
Priest was a world-builder too. The Dream Archipelago is a globe-spanning array of island states, each with its own politics, customs and culture, and where time and reality behave in strange and entrancing ways. The novel The Islanders is a kind of travelogue of the Archipelago. The later time-tripping book The Gradual is set there also, where a musician takes a months-long concert tour of the islands, only to find years have passed upon his return because he eschewed a seemingly meaningless ritual of island transit. The Evidence is another.
One of the most trenchant recent works, which I read in a single sitting on the roof of the Seng Hout hotel in Battambang, Cambodia, is called An American Story. It explores conspiracies around 9/11, but more disconcertingly for me, the notion that the democratisation of voice (words out of the mouth of Michael Moore) may harm as much as it liberates. Yes, the gatekeepers have gone (anyone can start a podcast or YouTube channel), but for every teller of truth to power, there's a countervailing conspiracist to drown them out. It's so much harder to dismantle a lie than to utter one. SciMan Dan makes a YouTube career out of debunking flat-earthers, who, thirty years ago, were the fringiest of fringe. Now they have Rode mics, 4K webcams and subscribers and conventions that attract thousands globally. Ha, see what I did there?
One of my favourite of his novels is Inverted World. Decades before Mortal Engines, it follows a scout working for a massive city that must be dragged across the world on tracks to avoid being destroyed. The reason is that the city was once of our Earth but has accidentally been transported to an inverted world where planets are three-dimensional parabolas rather than spheres and where the only place where dimensions are "optimal" for the city is constantly shifting.
For a Star Trek link, Priest write an extensive critique of Harlan Ellison and the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, which has spent more than fifty years in prepublication hell. The essay is entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever.
So now it's over. Another moment when the latest is the last. The latest movie with Robin Williams or Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The latest Kurt Vonnegut book. The latest Bowie song. The minute or two after closing Airside today was the last time I got to enjoy that feeling of pleasure and anticipation. True, Priest was 80, but I think of Shatner and Ken Loach and David Attenborough producing new ventures in their 80s and 90s. And he's been so prolific of late, Priest must have another one about to come out plus others in the planning. So there I was, wondering what was next.
Alas.
There's but one work remaining, a biography of JG Ballard. I might not have otherwise been interested in the life of Mr Ballard, but now I am very much looking forward to holding a new Priest book one last time. I know this is entirely selfish. I'm at that age where, more and more, after a lifetime of companionship, for want of a better word, the latest is the last. Discovering an author relatively early in their career, when they're young and edgy when we like to think of ourselves as young and edgy, and walking with them through the later stages of life, it's like a good marriage. But inevitably comes the separation (another Priest book name) - one partner will more than likely go first.
In the mad, inverted world we live in today, the death of a writer and his departure from the stage is of minor relative consequence. But I mourn his passing and all those anticipations I will no longer have.
Vale Christopher Priest. 1943-2024
I am so sorry...