Christopher Priest (novelist)

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Christopher Mackenzie Priest (14 July 1943 – 2 February 2024) was a British science fiction writer and novelist. His works include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), The Inverted World (1974), The Space Machine (1976), The Affirmation (1981), The Glamour (1984), The Prestige (1995), and The Separation (2002).

Priest was strongly influenced by the science fiction of H. G. Wells and in 2006 was appointed Vice-President of the international H. G. Wells Society.

Biography

Christopher Mackenzie Priest was born on 14 July 1943 in Cheadle, Cheshire, England.<ref name="locus06">Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> During his childhood he spent holidays in Dorset, where he explored the ancient hillfort of Maiden Castle near Dorchester, an experience that made a lasting impression on him and would later use as the location for the novel A Dream of Wessex (1977).

Priest was educated at Cheadle Hulme School and left at the age of sixteen, after which he worked as an accountancy clerk and audit clerk. He also held positions at a greeting card company and a mail order book publisher before committing fully to writing. Soon after leaving school he began writing, and in 1968 he gave up clerical employment to devote himself fully to a career as a freelance writer. His first published story, "The Run," appeared in Impulse magazine in May 1966.

Beyond his fiction writing, Priest was deeply involved in the science fiction community. He was active in fanzines and fandom from 1964, serving as Associate Editor of Foundation magazine from 1974 to 1977. He also lectured on science fiction and writing at The University of London and at Deakin University in Australia. In 1983, he was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, cementing his reputation as a significant literary voice.

Priest's personal life was marked by several marriages and relocations. In 1969 he married Christine Merchant, with whom he moved to London; the marriage ended after four years. In 1981 he married the American writer Lisa Tuttle, from whom he divorced in 1987.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The following year he married the science fiction writer Leigh Kennedy; the couple had twins, Elizabeth and Simon, before their marriage ended in 2011. That same year Priest began a relationship with the writer Nina Allan. They lived together from then on and were married in 2023.

Throughout his career, Priest lived in various locations that influenced his work. He resided in Devon and later on the Isle of Bute, locations that may have contributed to his fascination with islands and isolated landscapes that feature prominently in his Dream Archipelago series. His work was characterized by psychological complexity and an exploration of identity, memory, and reality that set him apart from conventional genre fiction.

Christopher Priest died on 2 February 2024, at the age of eighty.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> At the time of his death, he had nearly completed a nonfiction study of J.G. Ballard, having written 70,000 words of what would have been a comprehensive examination of the author who had significantly influenced his own work.

Career

Priest's first story, "The Run", was published in 1966.<ref name= locus06 /> Formerly an accountant and audit clerk, he became a full-time writer in 1968.<ref name= locus06 /> One of his early novels, The Affirmation, concerns a traumatized man who apparently flips into a delusional world in which he experiences a lengthy voyage to an archipelago of exotic islands. This setting played a part in many of Priest's short stories, which raises the question of whether the Dream Archipelago is actually a fantasy.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The state of mind depicted in this novel is similar to that of the delusional fantasy-prone psychoanalytic patient ("Kirk Allen") in Robert Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour, or Jack London's tortured prisoner in The Star Rover.

Priest also dealt with delusional alternate realities in A Dream of Wessex, in which a group of experimenters for a British government project are brain-wired to a hypnosis machine and jointly participate in an imaginary but as-real-as-real future in a vacation island off the coast of a Sovietized Britain.

His later novels include The Islanders (2011), set in the Dream Archipelago, and The Adjacent (2013), a multi-strand narrative with recurring characters.

Of his narrative's plot twists, Priest told an interviewer in 1995, "my shocks are based on a sudden devastating reversal of what the reader knows or believes."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Tie-in work

Priest wrote the tie-in novel to accompany the 1999 David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ, which contains themes of the novels A Dream of Wessex and The Extremes. Such themes include the question of the extent to which we can trust what we believe to be reality and our memories.

Priest was approached to write stories for the 18th and 19th seasons of Doctor Who. The first, "Sealed Orders", was a political thriller based on Gallifrey commissioned by script editor Douglas Adams;<ref>Template:Cite interview</ref> it was eventually abandoned due to script problems and replaced with "Warriors' Gate". The second, "The Enemy Within", was also eventually abandoned due to script problems and what Priest perceived as insulting treatment<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> after he was asked to modify the script to include the death of Adric. It was replaced by "Earthshock". Priest received payment while Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward were forced to pen a letter of apology for the treatment of the writer.

A film of his novel The Prestige was released on 20 October 2006. It was directed by Christopher Nolan and starred Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Despite differences between the novel and screenplay, Nolan was reportedly so concerned the denouement be kept a surprise that the US publisher's tie-in edition of the book was blocked from using any images from the film itself.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Pseudonyms

Priest is known to have used the pseudonyms John Luther Novak and Colin Wedgelock, usually for movie novelisations, and Donald MacKenzie. As well as the eXistenZ novelization (which undermined the pseudonym by including Priest's biography on the pre-title page), he has novelised the movies Mona Lisa (as John Luther Novak) and Short Circuit (as Colin Wedgelock).<ref name="sf-encyclopedia.com">Template:Cite web</ref> Priest co-operated with fellow British science fiction author David Langford on various enterprises under the Ansible brand.

Other writing

Priest wrote for The Guardian from 2002, largely obituaries of such figures as Robert Sheckley, Stanislaw Lem, Jack Williamson, Diana Wynne Jones, John Christopher and many more.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Awards and honours

Priest won the BSFA award for the best novel four times: in 1974 for Inverted World;<ref name="WWE-1974">Template:Cite web</ref> in 1998 for The Extremes;<ref name="WWE-1998">Template:Cite web</ref> in 2002 for The Separation<ref name="WWE-2002">Template:Cite web</ref> and in 2011 for The Islanders.<ref name="WWE-2011">Template:Cite web</ref>

Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the World Fantasy Award (for The Prestige<ref name="WWE-1996">Template:Cite web</ref>).

Priest won the BSFA award for short fiction in 1979 for the short story "Palely Loitering",<ref name="WWE-1979">Template:Cite web</ref> and was nominated for Hugo Awards in the categories of Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Non-Fiction Book (this last for The Book on the Edge of Forever (also known as Last Deadloss Visions), an exploration of the unpublished Last Dangerous Visions anthology). The Space Machine won the International SF prize in the 1977 Ditmar Awards The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1977 Ditmar Awards. Priest's 1979 essay "The Making of the Lesbian Horse" (published as a Novacon chapbook) takes a humorous look at the roots of his acclaimed novel Inverted World. He was guest of honour at Novacon 9 in 1979 and Novacon 30 in 2000, and at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in 2005.

In 1983 Priest was named one of the 20 Granta Best of Young British Novelists. In 1988 he won the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for The Glamour as Best Foreign Fiction Book.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Between 7 November and 7 December 2007, the Chelsea College of Art and Design had an exhibition in its gallery Chelsea Space inspired by Priest's novel The Affirmation. It followed "themes of personal history and memory (which) through the lens of a more antagonistic and critical form of interpretation, aims to point towards an overtly positive viewpoint on contemporary art practice over any traditional melancholy fixation".Template:Citation needed

Personal life and death

Priest lived in Devon, and later on the Isle of Bute.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He was married to writer Lisa Tuttle from 1981 to 1987, and from 1988 to 2011 to Leigh Kennedy,<ref name="sf-encyclopedia.com"/> with whom he had twins. He later lived with speculative fiction writer Nina Allan<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> until his death, by which time Allan had become his wife.<ref>Tying the knot Nina Allan</ref>

Priest died from small-cell carcinoma on 2 February 2024, at the age of 80.<ref>Christopher Priest 1943 – 2024 Nina Allan</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

  • Real-time World. Faber and Faber, 1975. Reissued 2009.
  • An Infinite Summer. Faber and Faber, 1979. Three stories reissued in The Dream Archipelago.
  • The Dream Archipelago. Earthlight, 1999. Reissued 2009.
  • Ersatz Wines – Instructive Short Stories GrimGrin Studio, 2008. Anthology of early works.
  • Episodes, Gollancz, 2019.

Short story in anthology, also as editor

  • Watson, Ian. Indhold:The Very Slow Time Machine
  • Sheckley, Robert. Is That What People Do?
  • Shaw, Bob. Amphitheatre
  • Priest, Christopher. The Negation
  • Harrison, Harry. The Greening Of The Green
  • Disch, Thomas M.. Mutability
  • Ballard, J.G.. One Afternoon At Utah Beach
  • Aldiss, Brian W.. A Chinese Perspective

Screenplay

Selected non-fiction

References

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