Inverted World
By Christopher Priest, 1974
This is not the Priest who wrote Black Panther comics, this is the Priest who wrote the book The Prestige was based on. If you care. I sort of care? This book is science fiction, according to the first part of John Clute's afterword, it's classified as "hard" SF, but I'm not sure why, as Clute's afterword lost me pretty much immediately after it started. He seems like a fine writer, but his afterword is one of those that assumes way too much about his audience's awareness of the nuances or history of a branch of writing that has always been, almost by design, somewhat obscure. On the other hand, Inverted World is also one of those books that has a back cover blurb written by somebody who should be slapped repeatedly in the face, because they fail to grasp that the book they're spoiling the pants off of is heavily dependent on rolling out its information in a very specific style at very specific times so that it can be made more obvious to the reader that the plot's construction is mirroring the plot's content, that you are supposed to discover information at the same moments the characters discover it instead of knowing it going in there. That being said, Priest doesn't seem to care about expanding upon why his characters feel the way they do, he just likes to depict them doing and perceiving thing--which means you have sections where seemingly important sequences are passed over in sentences like "they figured it out" alongside interesting (albeit dry) pages describing the, for example, deterioration of one's sense of vision. It's an impressive, intelligent book, but it's also incredibly cold.
-Tucker Stone, 2012
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