RIP Christopher Priest

 

I think have only read the one book by Christopher Priest - A Dream of Wessex. Read it when it first came out, borrowed from Berkhamsted library (almost certainly the edition pictured above). And then I  read it again in the 2010s, having picked up a hardback of the original US edition (mystifyingly retitled The Perfect Lover) at Glendale's s.f. + fantasy specialist shop Mystery and Imagination (now sadly closed but continuing as a mail order / internet operation). 

I have had copies of Fugue for a Darkening Island and Inverted World awaiting my attention for some time now. 

Two different copies of Fugue. He revised it for a later edition, muting some of its potentially offensive aspects (the scenario is social collapse / fascism in the U.K., caused by an overwhelming influx of refugees owing to war and famine). So when I realised I had bought the 'corrected' version, I had to get the original, didn't I?  (The title itself - "darkening island" -  is questionable... but Priest was no Powellite, indeed he revised the novel because he hated the idea of being misunderstood). 

Been meaning to check out The Glamour (title allures for obvious reasons) and The Prestige  (saw the film) and others in that single-noun-title series-not-series of his 

Reading John Clute's obituary at the Guardian, I see that he also wrote an intriguing WW2 alternative history, The Separation. 

But yes, Christopher Priest - one of those New Wave of British s.f. writers who lit up my mind prior to the plunge into music and music journalism. I'm grateful to all these writers, and their American counterparts. They stirred my imagination (for a while, stirred ambitions too - to become a s.f. and alternative history writer). And they provided escape during a turbulent upbringing. 

Apparently, at his death, Priest was working on a nearly but not quite completed study of J.G. Ballard, his biggest influence and a mentor. Hope that gets put out. 

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

The present flickers on a knife edge between the dystopian and the utopian - and here's Carl Neville with a new novel for Repeater that hurls the reader into a counterfactual world circa now that in some ways is close-to-utopian, but also contains within it dystopian aspects - or regions - far worse even than the worst that last week momentarily seemed to herald.

Here's how I blurbed it:

“Alternative history usually involves dystopian scenarios – counterfactual realities in which the Nazis conquered the world, the South won the Civil War, the Reformation never happened. Eminent Domain is that rare thing — a near-utopian version of the present more advanced and progressive than our own, rendered with a level of vivid and intricate detail comparable with William Gibson at his most disorienting. But where speculative fiction typically presents a warped mirror image of our own era, Carl Neville’s enthralling and immersive novel does something different – it makes you aware of the radical potentials, the different way things could be, that lurk latent in the world as it stands. Eminent Domain makes this present in which we currently languish feel like the impostor reality.”

More information and how to purchase Eminent Domain at the Repeater Books site.

Carl has started a series of blog essays that detail his journey through life, art, writing and thought that led to where he is now and the work he is doing. Here is the first installment.  He's also just blogged a couple of Spotify playlists related to Eminent Domain and its precursor-sibling novel Resolution Way.

Carl will also be convening a series of discussions on the theme of utopia to take place live on YouTube -  including one next week on music and the utopian in which I will be participating. More details on that to come.

Music and the utopian, eh? It's such an open-ended term and if you're not careful you can start thinking of any music that is vaguely suggestive of paradise or heaven. But in terms of music that actually proposes or enacts a model society, for months now - since doing the memorial lecture in fact - I have been obsessed with this song.

RIP Harry Harrison

I'm not sure how many stories by Harry Harrison I read in my teen s.f. fiend phase but the two that made an impression were:

The first is a terrific bleak and gritty novel set in a near-future (our past, now: 1999) New York, when overpopulation and resource-depletion have made life pretty fucking miserable. That 1966 novel was then turned into a vastly inferior movie, Soylent Green, with absurd alterations to the plot. (In Make Room!, soylent is not "made of people", it's made of soya and lentils. That and krill and seaweed crackers make up the diet for 99 percent of the population).

The second is an entertaining alternative history set in a world dominated by the British Empire (which still controls North America - hence the NASA-level grandiosity of digging a railway tunnel to connect the motherland and the colonies).


Oddly this past year I bought and reread Make Room! Make Room! (still excellent, and it would lend itself to being made into a far more faithful movie in the current climate for dystopian and post-cataclysm film/TV: Hunger Games, Revolution, etc). And I bought but have yet to reread A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!. Odder still  I also recently wrote (briefly) about HH in an article that looks at a bunch of things including steampunk, arguing that 1972's Hurrah! (also known as Tunnel Through the Deeps) is an unacknowledged precursor of that genre:

Harrison’s counterfactual world involves a British Empire that still rules all of North America because Washington’s revolutionary army was defeated and it  features such technological wonders as steam-powered airplanes fueled by the burning of coal dust.   

Describing the genesis of the novel, Harrison recalled that he realized his “parallel world... would be very much like a Victorian society with certain material changes. This would have to be, in some ways, a Victorian novel. [But] since, early on, I had decided it would be a light book, I did not dare even touch on the real condition of the Victorian working class, child prostitution and all the various ills of society at that period. I had to ignore them. So, true to the nature of the book but not true to my own beliefs, it did turn into a Tory's vision of glory for which I do apologise to my socialist friends.” 

That remark captures—and prophesies-a large element of the appeal of steampunk as a genre: the combination of quaint atmospherics and retro-reactionary formal properties (characterization, dialogue, plots, etc that all follow the adventure-hero model of pulp fiction genres or 19^th Century popular story-telling) with all of the technological gizmo thrills and marvellousness of science fiction.   

With alternative history and steampunk alike, there’s still that sense of world-turned-upside-down estrangement and disorientation that science fiction supplies, but it’s not set in the future or on some distant alien planet: it’s our world seen in a distorting mirror, made unrecognizable and slightly grotesque.