<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Christopher Priest (b. July 14, 1943 in Cheadle, Cheshire, England) is a British author. Most of Christopher Priest's short stories from the 1960s and early 1970s originally appeared in British magazines and have not been generally available in the US. His first novel, Indoctrinaire (1970) is set in a dystopian future Brazil and attracted little attention despite its innovative approach to the subject. His second, Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), further demonstrated his willingness to tackle difficult and controversial themes, in this case racial prejudice erupting in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The Inverted World (1974) aroused significant interest in part because of its unique setting, a world where the laws of physics are different and time is measured by the distance traveled by perambulating cities.

The author's strong literary sensibilities and his penchant for unusual twists continued to manifest itself in the novels that followed, although he never developed a strong following in the US. The Space Machine (1976) is an unconventional retelling of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The Perfect Lover (1977, aka A Dream of Wessex) explores one possible future through dream therapy, in this case one where the Soviets dominate the British Isles except for Wessex, which has been physically severed from the mainland following a series of earthquakes. Many of Priest's stories are set in a world that seems just slightly out of step with our own, a plot device used extremely well in The Affirmation (1981), in which a man finds that he can move between slightly different alternate realities, and even more effectively in his recent The Separation (2002), an alternate World War II story, and certainly his single most impressive book.

Three of his novels involve rationalized magic or natural processes that remain inexplicable. In The Glamour (1984), some people have a psi power that enables them to become effectively invisible. The Prestige (1995) describes the rivalry between two stage magicians, one of whom is so determined to discover the secret of a trick masterminded by the other that he literally invents a new technology to do so. Extremes (1999) deals with time travel paradoxes in non-mechanical and extraordinary ways. Although Priest is certainly one of the most skillful writers working in the field, his fiction generally avoids the clichés of the genre and is sufficiently out of the mainstream that casual readers may have difficulty relating to his novels as SF.

Priest was married to Lisa Tuttle during the 1980s and is now married to Leigh Kennedy. His 1987 pamphlet, "The Last Deadloss Visions", critical of the prospects of the anthology, "The Last Dangerous Visions", was very controversial. He writes in other fields under several pseudonyms. His highly atmospheric "Dream Archipelago" short stories have been collected as An Infinite Summer (1979). He has also written occasional media tie-ins.