Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

When Helward Mann leaves town he has no reason to think that the world beyond is not altoghether alien. But in fact, despite all he has always been told, there is evidence that slowly contradict all his convictions. As he grows his work experience outside the city, he is forcedin his struggle for survival
to accept the rationale.

As a member of one of the guilds that manages to move the city on rails, plowing a wasteland full of hostile tribes he lays the rails in front of the city and carefully removes them in its wake. The rivers and mountains are a virtually insurmountable obstacle to the technical ingenuity of the guilds but if it stops moving, the city will fall in the gravitational field that has become destructive of all life on Earth. So, the only alternative to death is progress.

This is a classic science fiction book, one in which the laws of physics may seem a little strained but are explained at the end. Mysteries unraveled keep the reader interested throughout the book. Everything is centered at first in the moving city: how, why, when, and the Guild society within. Weird and exciting in the middle, it ends with a more realistic note. This is a cold book, relationships and characters are even chilly but in spite of this, that makes a bit difficult to become involved with the characters and their lives, its utterly fascinating and keeps you guessing about the nature of reality until the end.

awards: BSFA winner, 1974, Hugo Award nominee, 1975




Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.
His most recently published novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo award. He has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement.

He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society.

He is married to the writer Leigh Kennedy. They live in Hastings, England, with their twin adult children, Elizabeth and Simon.