A Son of the Rock

Gollancz, 2020, 360 p

This is a collection of the late author‘s shorter work culled from throughout his career. Each story is prefaced by a ‘Before’ section saying how it came to be written and an ‘After’ section describing how the writing went and where the story was published. Priest’s writing is always controlled and well executed. In general it tends towards a feeling of unease, as if something is lurking below the surface or what has seemed to be reality morphs into something else but here I was surprised by how much of the contents leaned towards horror.

The Head and the Hand. A man who had become famous through allowing himself to be mutilated is persuaded out of retirement for a final cut.

A Dying Fall relates the thoughts that flash through a man’s mind as he is falling in front of a subway train. They are of travelling on a motorway in Belgium and of the training course in parachute jumping/sky diving he took there.

I, Haruspex is, I assume, in the mould of H P Lovecraft. (Priest’s ‘Before’word says it was solicited by a games company wanting something based on that author’s Cthulhu Mythos but he had no familiarity with that at all – similarly I have not. The company, while paying, never used the story and Priest later found a home for it elsewhere.) Effective in its own way it is told in an old-fashioned language of stilted particularity that, for a first person narration, is curiously distanced (not to mention distancing) and overladen with exclamation marks. After consuming his special meals, narrator James Owsley, descendant of a long line of haruspices, can halt or reverse time for a while. Off the Great Hall of his home, Beckon Abbey, lies a hagioscope over a pit which loathsome things are seeking to escape. In a nearby bog a German bomber plane is held in slow suspension as it crashes after being shot down, even though this is 1936. Someone, not a member of its crew, waves to him from the impending wreck and a voice speaks in his head.

Like the author’s novel The Space Machine, written as an hommage to H G Wells, Palely Loitering, a tale of time travel and thwarted love, bears the influence of Edwardian fiction. Despite including space travel (the McGuffin here – called the Flux Channel – was built to help launch a starship on its way,) the story has a resolutely antique feel to it. Its atmosphere of picnics and bandstands, its social and family dynamics were distinctly retro even in the 1979 in which it was first published. After the starship left, three bridges were built across the Flux Channel. The one leading straight across is the ‘Today’ bridge, two others, built at slight angles to the Channel, lead respectively to ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Tomorrow’. Our narrator as a boy one day leapt off the end of the ‘Tomorrow’ bridge and found himself thirty-four years in the future, where a young woman is pointed out to him by a man who says she is waiting for her sweetheart. The reader can from then fill in the gaps but Priest’s execution of the story is impressive.

An Infinite Summer again bears Edwardian hallmarks – but then part of it is set in 1903 where Thomas Lloyd is on the point of proposing to his intended, Sarah, when he is frozen by a camera-like device wielded by someone from the future. The frozen tableaux which result from these capturings can not be seen by contemporary passers-by but only by the unfrozen and the travellers from the future. The effect on Thomas wears off only in 1935 when he is free to move around again but has to wait more years for Sarah to unfreeze. In 1940 he, and Sarah’s image, are caught in the aftermath of the shooting down of a German bomber. The image of one of the bomber’s German crew held in suspension above a river after being captured by a freezer is unforgettable. I note the similarities here between this incident and the one in I Haruspex.

The Ament* is the tale of a man who was once part of a project to film two children, one male and one female, every week, to document changes during their growth and beyond, but who in his adulthood has dreams of committing murder. But are they dreams? The story is told in two alternating voices, his and a third person viewpoint.

The Invisible Men are those (not all men) who are detailed by their USian masters to spy on a British Prime Minister who feels he has to resign due to a financial scandal. (His statement that, “It’s British tradition for a public figure to resign his position if caught in the wrong,” seems altogether quaint now, 50 years after first publication.) His observations of his surroundings on a clandestine meeting on the Norfolk coast with his USian partner – a co-leader of a UK seemingly on the brink of becoming the 51^st State – imbue the tale with a sense of foreboding.

The Stooge is employed by a stage illusionist to fake amazement at his tricks on being ‘randomly’ picked from his audience. The story’s title becomes doubly apposite.

In futouristic.co.uk a man responds to an email offering to sell him a time machine. It doesn’t work. For him.

Shooting an Episode presents the ultimate in reality TV, though it’s more like reality streaming. For its subjects no holds are barred. The trouble comes when our narrator has to go in amongst the participants to clean up their mess.

In The Sorting Out Melvina comes home late one night to find her door lying open having been forced. With increasing fear she moves through all her rooms, wondering if the man she has recently dumped has something to do with it, but a phone call reveals he is an hour away. Yet various of her books have been misplaced, their dust covers placed upside down, their normal, random arrangement systematised. One has been glued to a curtain.

In its ‘After’word Priest describes the gathering of books (which is what most readers do) as a kind of quiet madness. Well, all obsessions are. At least it’s a harmless madness.

*Amentia is the condition of feeble-mindedness or other general mental deficiency.

Pedant’s corner: Méliès’ (Méliès’s – especially since the final ‘s’ of Méliès is unsounded, thus demanding the apostrophe ‘s’ for its possessive,) maws (used for ‘mouth’; a maw is of course a stomach,) interlocuter (interlocutor,) aureole (areola,) Mrs Adams’ (Adams’s,) “more yachts were parked further away” (parked? Can you park a yacht?) “the king” (x 2, the King,) “the sort of problems the bank were concerned with” (the bank was concerned with,) soccer (football.)

I was shocked to learn of the death of writer Christopher Priest.

Yes he was 80 and it seems he had cancer (but of course I did not know that) but the news nevertheless came as a jolt.

I had followed his blog posts – see my sidebar – but he usually posted intermittently so the lack of recent posts did not seem significant.

I had probably heard of him in the 1960s via short stories but certainly by the time of his first novel (Indoctrinaire, 1970) and I bought and read his books keenly. His work makes up a substantial portion of my SF collection. Typically the reality in his narratives is slippery, with things gradually morphing from the seemingly quotidian to something more other worldly.

He will most probably be remembered for his stories set in the Dream Archipelago, a world recognisably like ours but yet twisted slightly out of true and which evolved over time.

I was lucky enough to meet him a few times at Science Fiction conventions. The last time was at the Harrogate Eastercon (six years ago now) – quite some time since we had last met – and since I am a relatively little known SF writer/reviewer – I was surprised he recognised me. He even remembered I hail from Dumbarton and introduced me to his partner Nina Allan (whom he married last year) as coming from the town. He was unfailingly courteous, friendly and encouraging.

I have of course read most of his books and have reviewed many of them on here (the link is to every mention of Priest on this blog.) His prose never fell below the highest quality. Had his work not been so closely aligned to Science Fiction and the speculative he would undoubtedly have received more praise from the usual literati suspects than he in fact did.

My consolation (if there is one) is that there are still some of his books on my tbr pile.

Christopher Mackenzie Priest: 14/7/1943 – 2/2/2024. So it goes.

Gollancz, 2020, 318p.

This is the latest of the author’s forays into the world of the Dream Archipelago which he first brought to our attention in 1981 in The Affirmation. Like our own world, it has changed somewhat in the years since that first appearance. Its invention does though give the author an opportunity to comment on our world while still providing an element of skew. His imagined world is familiar but always perceptibly different from our own.

This slipperiness is not confined to the Dream Archipelago. In most of Priest’s works things tend to be numinous. Appearances can be deceptive, or alter; but in the Dream Archipelago that is literally so. In some locations more than others something called mutability affects the topography but in a way such that afterwards it is just accepted and no-one comments on the change. It is almost as if that change has never been. Later Fremde tells us, “Money and high finance were a system of belief.” And adds that the onset of mutability was a belief system similar to high finance. The events were real, but afterwards only the results counted, so that no one believed the process had really happened; they became abstract.

In many ways reading a Priest novel is exactly like that. Something has happened. You are no longer where you were when you started yet the mechanism of getting there remains obscure. It is a neat trick to pull off but Priest’s glides between realities can be all but seamless.

In The Evidence viewpoint character Todd Fremde lives with his partner Jo Delson on the Salay Islands, a group containing five main landmasses, Salay Ewell, Sekonda, Tielet, Raba and Hames, each of which are always referred to in speech as “the island” followed by its ordinal number. For example “Salay Tielet, the third.” Fremde is a writer of crime fiction who has been invited to the northern University of Dearth to give a lecture on “The Role of the Modern Crime Novel in a Crime-Free Society” (which Dearth claims to be,) necessitating an air journey and a long rail trip. His welcome is odd, the instructions for his hotel key cards even more so. One is relatively normal, the other a mutability safeguard. Moreover, everything in his room is to be switched off whenever he leaves. This minor aspect of the novel is an illustration of mutability but is an adjunct to the main narrative. Here it is almost as if Priest is demonstrating his ability to conjure up such concepts, not quite backgrounding for the sake of it, but showing us his world-building. In this regard the society of the Dream Archipelago is structured along feudal lines (but not absolutely rigidly so: for instance here there is no restriction on travel.) Its inhabitants are characterised as Serf, Citizen Serf, Villein, Squire, Vassal, Corvée Provider, Cartage Provider, Demesne Landed, Knight, Manorial Landed, Baron, Seignior. Most of the time this makes no impact on the story.

In Dearth, Fremde is waylaid by one Frejah Harsent, with a tale of a murder – or two – in Salay. Despite himself Fremde is drawn into the who, how, what and why of those crimes. However, a fair part of the text constitutes a disquisition on the purposes and practice of the crime novel and the lot of the novelist. With particular reference to the peculiarities of the Dream Archipelago, Priest, through Fremde, treats us to thoughts such as “All writers are serfs,” and “Writers never fit into a social system,” but “No one tells me when to work, how to work, what I should write in my books, where I might travel.” At one point we even have Harsent give to him “the suggestion novelists never have an answer for, and try to avoid at all costs,” an idea for a story. He tells her, “Story is seen as unique to each novel,” and “people want stories to work properly … to give a kind of satisfaction,” not to be messy or unresolved as in real life. It is perhaps here that we are being prepared for a diversion from that template as, later, Priest appears to toy with the idea of the narrator becoming the victim only to draw back.

Priest’s work can be full of echoes. The Prestige focused on a rivalry between stage magicians. In The Evidence part of Fremde’s investigation involves the demise of another such entertainer and we are shown the mechanics of how one of his illusions worked.

In Priest’s worlds nothing is simple yet while having a certain kind of flatness and a distancing detachment his prose is clear. What it describes is not. What we see is not necessarily what we get.

Fremde’s cat is called Barmi. We make of that what we will.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval later” (or equivalent) count:- ten or so. The USian usages, ‘trunk’ for ‘boot,’ parking lot, etc suggest that this was typeset for the US Market and not translated for publication in the UK. Otherwise; “He would then have laid low” (lain low.)

Scribner, 1999, 398 p.

FBI operative Teresa Simons has lost her husband in one of those shooting incidents typical of the US. In an attempt to assuage her grief and probe the circumstances of similar tragedies she has travelled to her native England, from where her parents emigrated when she was young, to visit the south coast town of Bulverton, also scene of a (much less typical) mass shooting several months before. In her FBI training to improve the responses of law enforcement agents in such cases Teresa had undergone many immersions in virtual reality scenarios of shooting incidents. We are given accounts of several of these where Teresa inhabited the minds of different participants – victims, bystanders, perpetrator. Commercial VR outlets are also a feature of this world and, in them, shooting simulations (as well as the inevitable porn) are widely popular. Employees of the GunHo Corporation, purveyors of ExEx (extreme experience, their version of virtual reality, which overall amounts to the second largest economy in this world) also occupy the hotel where Teresa is staying and are willing to pay the town’s inhabitants enormous sums for their recollections of the fatal day.

Like Philip K Dick, Priest has always been a slippery prospect. In his work appearances can be deceptive and reality tenuous. As Teresa delves deeper into ExEx’s wares, trying to find the limits to their scenarios, the outside world starts to become less concrete. If, in a scenario, you enter an ExEx property within it and immerse yourself in one of its simulations where will you emerge when you activate the trigger that is supposed to restore you to the ‘real’ world? In particular she has to face up to her own responsibility for, within an ExEx simulation, inadvertently showing the Bulverton shooter how to handle the gun he is carrying. Is she to blame for the subsequent deaths? This has the potential to takes us down a rabbit hole which Priest manages to sidestep but the phrase, “Extreme reality was a landscape of forking paths,” is undoubtedly a nod to Borges’s famous short story wherein he presaged the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by decades.

The subject matter invites comment. The fascination some people have with guns is undoubted but I suspect they would not be swayed out of it in any way by the observation, however true, that, “the more there were people who owned guns, who made themselves expert with guns, who prepared to defend themselves with guns, who went on hunting trips with guns, who mouthed slogans about freedom and rights being dependent on guns, the more those guns were likely to be abused and to fall into the wrong hands.”

As usual Priest’s characters are well drawn and believable. This is so even within the virtual realities. For a twenty year-old narrative this still holds up remarkably well.

Pedant’s corner:- On the cover and spine the title is given as the Extremes but the title page has The Extremes. At times the narrative slips between English and USian usages. Otherwise; Mrs Simons’ (Simons’s,) epicentre (centre,) “in bright orange shirt” (in a bright …,) “the police Swat team were trying to gain access” (the police Swat team was trying ….) “A crowd … were staring” (a crowd … was staring,) non-antibioticly (non-antibiotically?) Mrs Williams’ (Williams’s.) “She thought, Any more of this and….” (Either put the ‘any more of this and….’ in quotation marks or lose the capital ‘A’.)

Gollancz, 2014, 238 p.

Writer Alice Stockton lives in a Hampshire which has suffered the fallout from a nuclear accident at Cap la Hague in France. Despite there being no obvious reason for it she has had her latest manuscript impounded by agents acting for the government. Her only local friend, a much older woman named Eleanor, has been found murdered. Alice’s story is narrated in the third person and interspersed at times with a first person narrative by Eleanor’s son Gordon Sinclair, who also goes under the name of Peter Hamilton. As Hamilton he works, at arm’s length from the government, in information management – de facto censorship. Hence the ability to prevent Alice’s manuscript being published and to demand any copies, electronic or otherwise, be destroyed.

There are early hints that the first person narration may be unreliable when the narrator’s car and torch cut out and he observes spinning cylinders make circles in the nearby crops before disappearing as mysteriously as they arrived. However this incident is only once referred to again and can be taken to be imagined or hallucinated. However potential unreliability is underscored by part of one of the two letters Eleanor wrote for Alice wherein she says, “I am by nature a concealer and disguiser, a natural fiction writer,” and (a book should have) “little facts that don’t add up, that misdirect the truth.” Then there is the very late scene which is described in both the first and third person narratives with substantial discrepancies between the two. Two of the first person chapters describe acts of extreme sexual violence on their narrator’s part. They also describe Sinclair’s mother (in the third person sections a relatively benign presence) as relating to him from an early age stories of her life before he was born with sexual details foregrounded. Again a reading of delusion on the narrator’s part seems in order.

Priest’s prose is immensely readable but there is something elusive about what purpose his book might serve. The total mismatch between Sinclair’s accounts of events and the seemingly more authoritative third person sections reinforce the reading that he is unhinged (at best.) Yet he is a powerful man – able to alter the official records pertaining to Alice’s life. Even in authoritarian systems surely someone would notice? Then there is Alice’s sudden conviction, without any evidence, that Sinclair is responsible for his mother’s death. And the bit about authors being paid merely for submitting manuscripts to the “European Repository of Human Knowledge” is just bizarre.

The quiet woman of the title is presumably Eleanor, she speaks to us only through those two letters to Alice which Priest vouchsafes us, yet as a result is paradoxically too quiet. This is only one of the aspects of the novel which are unbalanced. The Quiet Woman is not one of Priest’s major works but interesting enough, if a little frustrating.

Pedant’s corner:- “we hurried back along to promenade (along the promenade? Along to the promenade?) “one three sent to England one of three,) “she knew he that he wasn’t sure who she was” (miss that first “he”? or “he that”?) “How could she had forgotten?” (have,) one end quote where there had been no dialogue, an personal nature (a,) “Tom pushed the bolt of the door home” followed nine lines later, with no other mention of the bolt, “Alice pushed home the bolt on the door,” plus seven or eight instances of “time interval later”.

Gollancz, 2013, 419 p.

My fourth BSFA Award book out of this year’s five. Aren’t libraries wonderful? The Adjacent is also on the Clarke Award list.

Over the course of the last two decades or more Christopher Priest has been exploring various themes to do with the nature of illusion and reality. Recurring preoccupations have been photographers, doppelgängers, the Second World War, stage magic, the strange world of the Dream Archipelago. He returns to all of these in The Adjacent.

In the mid twenty-first century, photographer Tibor Tarent’s wife Melanie has disappeared from the field hospital in Anatolia where she was working and to where he had accompanied her in a misguided attempt to stop their marriage crumbling. She is presumed dead. He returns to what, from the descriptions of women’s clothing, the habitual greetings of its inhabitants and its designation as part of a Kalifate, is presumably the Islamic Republic of Great Britain but is only ever referred to as the IRGB. (The provenance of this political entity is never satisfactorily explained. It seems somewhat gratuitous, the novel would work as well without it.) A strange new weapon whose deployment is accompanied by a bright light is making whole areas disappear, flattened, leaving only a triangular crater. London has been badly hit. It was an event like this in which Melanie disappeared.

Tommy Trent is a stage magician drafted in by the Royal Naval Air Service to help make their aeroplanes “invisible” during the Great War. On his way to France he meets one Herbert George Wells. What this section contributes to the overall picture beyond allowing considerations of the craft of stage magic – distraction, misdirection, hiding in plain sight and so on – is moot. It could, of course, be a distraction itself.

The progenitor of the Perturbative Adjacency Field, Thijs Rietveld, is interviewed at his home. Almost incidentally a Tibor Tarent is the photographer for this project. Rietveld seems to be able to make a conch shell appear and disappear at will. He explains the effects of a perturbative adjacency field to the reporter.

Michael Torrance, an aircraftman at a Second World War bomber base in Lincolnshire, meets a Polish woman member of the Air Transport Auxiliary who relates her life history up to the point where she had to leave Poland due to the German invasion.

On the Dream Archipelago island of Prachous there is a camp city called Adjacent which no-one is supposed to know about or visit. Tomak Tarrant journeys through this with an emigmatic woman known as The Spreader of the Word. Also on Prachous, Thom the Thaumaturge finds a young female assistant for his stage act. This helps him to secure a week of performances at ‘The Grand Aviator Palace.’

Nothing in this book is as it appears. Similar events occur to, similar things are said by, different people in different times and different places. Characters are mistaken for other people. What at first seem to be the same events as seen from different perspectives turn out differently, names are subtly altered, transitions from location to location can occur at times without a mechanism while at others there is one. Not a straightforward read then.

Everything here is all very accomplished and worked out. Priest undeniably writes like a dream. But.

Is it all just smoke and mirrors?

There are two ways of looking at this. One is to say that this is a writer at the height of his powers demonstrating the arbitrariness and unknowability of the world. Another is to question if this is the spectacle of an author writing his cake and eating it. In particular, the drawing in of the Dream Archipelago to The Adjacent, as if in an attempt to bring all of Priest’s recent fiction into a linked whole, may have been a misstep. The Archipelago is certainly a reflection of our world and therefore illuminates it, but it is also distanced from it. The connection with it that Priest establishes here renders it somehow more prosaic.

Priest is, though, an author of considerable gifts and insight, not to mention a searching intelligence. He is entitled to the benefit of any doubt.

All writing is the creation of illusions. As readers we like to think we can penetrate the mist in which they are wrapped. The Adjacent suggests that mist might be all there is.

Pedant’s corner:-
Span count 1 – though there was a spun on the same page – and signs of catering to the US market (fit for fitted, Kalifate for Caliphate.)

Earthlight, 1999, 264 p.

This is the first collection of Priest’s stories set in the Dream Archipelago, preceding The Islanders by 12 or so years, though apart from the introductory The Equatorial Moment – describing the strange vortex which affects the planet and presumably written especially for this book – the stories herein are considerably older.

The Negation features an author, Moylita Kaine, who has written a book called The Affirmation. (Priest later reused this title for a novel of his own and Kaine reappears in The Islanders.) Kaine’s book fascinates a border guard, Dik, who visits her in her position as writer in residence in the town where he is on leave.

Whores is a strange tale of another (unnamed) soldier whose visit to one of the whores of the title – forced into that profession by the enemy’s prior occupation of the island – has unexpected consequences.

The Cremation has Graian Sheeld travel to a funeral on an island where the customs are strange to him. His faux-pas lead him to a mistake. In parts this reminded me of the work of Michael G Coney. There is an enigmatic woman, a particularly nasty indigenous lifeform known as a thryme and its unusual life cycle.

The Miraculous Cairn is a tale of narrator Lenden’s sexual awakening combined with an unusual – possibly hallucinatory – encounter, and its ramifications resounding in later life.

The Watched has another of Priest’s confused protagonists. Ordier is fascinated by the mysterious Qataari who have been decanted from their ancestral peninsular home as a result of the war but who are notoriously secretive. A folly on the land he has bought allows him to spy on them.

As a collection this is fine but it doesn’t add up to a whole in the same way The Islanders did. But then it probably wasn’t supposed to.

There are some USian usages presumably because of where some of the stories were first published (though a twice mentioned casket is also once referred to as a coffin.)

Then there was the strange sentence, “You did not make rape my wife?” which badly needed editing and (twice) the common misuse of aureole for areola.

Gollancz, 2004, 405 p

This is an altered history of a superior sort which won the BSFA Award for 2002 and the Clarke Award in 2003. It focuses on the lives of twin brothers, Jack and Joe Sawyer, who both have the same middle initial and so can be easily confused for one another. The twins won a bronze medal in the coxswainless pairs at the Berlin Olympics. Their medals were presented to them by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who plays a large part in the novel. Both Joe’s and Jack’s written (or transcribed) memories carry the burden of the narrative.

While in Berlin the twins stay at the home of some Jews their parents were friendly with. When they leave they smuggle the couple’s daughter, Birgit, out of Germany in the boot of their car. She soon marries Joe. After war comes in 1939 Jack joins the RAF and subsequently pilots bombing raids over Germany, while Joe is a conscientious objector and undertakes work for the Red Cross. Given the attitudes they presented while in Germany both these developments are surprising.

There is a framing device (which is not returned to so it’s more like a set-up device) where Stuart Gratton, a historian searching for his next subject, has happened upon the twins’ existence. This is a curious sort of prelude as it serves to unbalance the narrative somewhat. It is set in a world where the British war with Germany ended on May 10^th 1941 (the day in our world when Hess landed in Scotland and was taken prisoner). An untrammelled Germany then overpowers the USSR, the USA is embroiled in a war in China – where it defeats Mao – and there is a subsequent Cold War with Germany. Yet the notebooks Gratton receives from Jack Sawyer’s daughter describe memories from our world. In these notes Jack is asked by Churchill to meet the imprisoned Hess and concludes the prisoner is a look-alike. That within the body of the novel The Separation Gratton does not comment on these discrepancies compared to the history of his world struck me as odd. That there may be a possible connection between Gratton and the twins is something we have to infer for ourselves.

Possibly due to his conscientious objection Joe is set upon and suffers head injuries. Thereafter he experiences “lucid imaginings” – premonitions, hallucinations, experiences from other realities – which provide a rationale of sorts for the altered history. The hint of unreliability hangs heavy over all of this though.

There is not one separation here but several. A possibility, not of one altered reality, but quite a few. Whether the real Hess took off for Britain (claims that the Hess tried at Nuremberg and held in Spandau Prison was not real have been refuted) whether he was shot down by his own side, the twins’ estrangement due to them both loving Birgit, the peace talks and armistice, Joe’s “imaginings,” Gratton’s from the twins.

I’m not entirely sure that in the end the novel as a whole coheres but Priest’s writing is always enough to make the journey through one of his books worthwhile.

Gollancz, 2011, 339p

This one is odd. Normally a novel unfolds by the interactions of various characters and the intertwinings of their stories – however separate their narratives may seem to be from the outset – all set out in a standard narrative format, albeit with digressions or flashbacks or indeed flashes forward. This book strays far from such conventionality. It is set out as a gazetteer. Each “chapter”€ title is that of an island in the Dream Archipelago – a place of indeterminable geography due to “€œtemporal gradients”€ and a “vortex”€ which distorts perception – which Priest has visited before. Different “€œchapters”€ take different forms: some are exactly like entries in a gazetteer (including tourist information relating to local laws, currencies used etc) others are more conventional first person narratives, there is even a police (Priest uses the description policier) interview transcript; but all drip information either about the world of the Dream Archipelago or its inhabitants. Indeed were I to be hypercritical I could describe the book as a giant info dump interspersed with (relatively few) short stories.

However, SF likes to think of itself as innovative. Where better to find altered ways to tell stories, to redefine what constitutes a novel? And this is on the BSFA Award short list (but not the Clarke, to whose choices this year Priest has objected.) I somehow doubt, though, that writing novels as if they were gazetteers is going to catch on.

Nevertheless in The Islanders a picture of the world and its complexities builds up over time. Early on, a confession to a murder in a theatre leads to an execution – later episodes cast doubt on whether the death was a murder at all, and if so who was really responsible. The narrative sections are mostly concerned with creative types, mainly writers and artists. Events are experienced through various eyes and are seen to be as mutable -€“ or incapable of full comprehension -€“ as the Archipelago’€™s geography.

Yet – to be hypercritical again – none of the stories really requires the off-Earth setting, each could take place in our here and now. Much of the discourse is familiar, we have cars, computers, the internet, email; the flora and fauna are unexceptional, we even have bananas. The world, set between two warring powers – one from each of the two polar continents which are separated by the ocean in which the Archipelago (more or less protected by the neutrality pact which is supposed to safeguard the islands’ sovereignties) sits, is almost humdrum in its similarities to our own. The islands’€™ polities appear akin to our own Channel Islands, being feudal and overseen by Seigniors some of whom are more benevolent than others. And warring powers behave as they will in any time or place.

The Islanders is novel, I would agree. But a novel? It’€™s ingenious and an impressive achievement; but in the end the structure does not fully satisfy; there are too many interconnections between the “chapters” for the book to convince as a gazetteer, and too few for a rounded novel. Nevertheless between the three candidates for the BSFA Award which I have read so far it is, I would say, the strongest contender.

In response to the BBC’s list of 100 books that shaped the world Christopher Priest has blogged his 100 ‘key’ titles.

As usual the ones in bold I have read. (20 here. Others are on my tbr pile.) If asterisked I have read part of the works mentioned. Question marks mean I can’t remember if I read it in the long ago.

01. Penguin SF Ed. Brian Aldiss
02. Non-Stop Brian Aldiss
03. New Maps of Hell Kingsley Amis
04. The Green Man Kingsley Amis
05. The Four-Dimensional Nightmare J G Ballard
06. Vermilion Sands J G Ballard
07. The Twins at St Clare’s Enid Blyton
08. The Castle of Adventure Enid Blyton
09. The Mountain of Adventure Enid Blyton
10. 2666 Roberto Bolaño
11. Last Evenings on Earth Roberto Bolaño
12. Don’t Point that Thing at Me Kyril Bonfiglioli
13. Fictions Jorge Luis Borges
14. The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles
15. The Silver Locusts Ray Bradbury
16. The Naked Island Russell Braddon
17. The Dam Busters Paul Brickhill
18. Project Jupiter Fredric Brown
19. What Mad Universe Fredric Brown
20. Rogue Moon Algis Budrys
21. Dark Avenues Ivan Bunin
22. The People’s War Angus Calder
23. That Summer in Paris Morley Callaghan
24. The Outsider Albert Camus
25. Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
26. No Moon Tonight Don Charlwood
27. Bomber Pilot Leonard Cheshire
28. The World in Winter John Christopher
29. The Second World War Winston S Churchill
30. The City and the Stars Arthur C Clarke
31. Mariners of Space Erroll Collins
32. Enemies of Promise Cyril Connolly
33. Fifth Business Robertson Davies
34. Complete Holmes Stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
35. Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich
36. Who Killed Hanratty? Paul Foot
37. Modern English Usage H W Fowler
38. The French Lieutenant’s Woman John Fowles
39. The Magus John Fowles
40. Diaries Joseph Goebbels
41. Adventures in the Screen Trade William Goldman
42. The Killing of Julia Wallace Jonathan Goodman
43. Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves
44. A Sort of Life Graham Greene
45. The Quiet American Graham Greene
46. The Door into Summer Robert A Heinlein ???
47. Catch 22 Joseph Heller
48. A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway
49. Hiroshima John Hersey
50. Pictorial History of the War Walter Hutchinson
51. Biggles and the Cruise of the Condor W E Johns
52. Dubliners James Joyce
53. Ice Anna Kavan
54. A History of Warfare John Keegan
55. Fame Daniel Kehlmann
56. 10 Rillington Place Ludovic Kennedy
57. Jack the Ripper – The Final Solution Stephen Knight
58. Steps Jerzy Kosinski
59. The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski
60. Changing Places David Lodge
61. Small World David Lodge
62. The False Inspector Dew Peter Lovesey
63. High Tide Mark Lynas
64. Revolution in the Head Ian MacDonald
65. Calculated Risk Charles Eric Maine
66. The Caltraps of Time David I Masson
67. Owning Up George Melly
68. The Cruel Sea Nicholas Monsarrat
69. Pax Britannica James Morris
70. Song of the Sky Guy Murchie
71. A Severed Head Iris Murdoch
72. Collected Stories Vladimir Nabokov
73. Collected Essays George Orwell
74. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
75. The Tale of Samuel Whiskers Beatrix Potter
76. Invisibility Steve Richards
77. Pavane Keith Roberts
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
79. Collected Sonnets William Shakespeare*
80. Hamlet William Shakespeare
81. Pilgrimage to Earth Robert Sheckley
82. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
83. Larry’s Party Carol Shields
84. Mary Swann Carol Shields
85. On the Beach Nevil Shute
86. Loitering with Intent Muriel Spark
87. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas Gertrude Stein
88. Earth Abides George R Stewart
89. Dracula Bram Stoker
90. The Murder of Rudolf Hess Hugh Thomas
91. Battle Cry Leon M Uris
92. No Night is Too Long Barbara Vine
93. Twins Peter Watson
94. The War of the Worlds H G Wells
95. The Time Machine H G Wells
96. Uncharted Seas Dennis Wheatley
97. Disappearances William Wiser
98. The Crazy Years William Wiser
99. The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham
100. The Kraken Wakes John Wyndham