Christopher Priest - Free Library Land Online

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Two 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later. Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other's shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity. At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.]]> Fri, 27 Oct 1995 23:01:26 +0200 The Space Machine https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55252-the_space_machine.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55252-the_space_machine.html

From the back cover:
The story of the War of the worlds as it has never been told before. Mars was invading the earth! Giant, long-legged machines, operated by gruesome, octopus-like creatures, were moving over the globe, leveling all opposition, laying waste to cities and countryside, on the verge of horrifying triumph. This was the War of the Worlds as we know it. Now at last we can learn the story we do not know -- the incredibly enthralling, almost unbearably suspenseful story of a man and a woman from Victorian England who traveled through time and space to a startling and momentous rendezvous with the desitny in ---- The Space Machine]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 An Infinite Summer https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55256-an_infinite_summer.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55256-an_infinite_summer.html

Cover Artist: Don Punchatz Contents:
Introduction
An Infinite Summer (1976) novelette
Whores (1978) shortstory
Palely Loitering (1979) novelette
The Negation (1978) novelette
The Watched (1978) novella]]> Sat, 27 Oct 1979 23:01:26 +0300 eXistenZ https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55258-existenz.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55258-existenz.html

A world where fantasy is more real than life itself.You are in a society where game designers are superstars and players can organically enter their favorite games. . . . A society where no one is more desired than Allegra Geller, the hip gaming goddess whose latest system, eXistenZ, takes a quantum leap beyond anything ever imagined--tapping so deeply into its users' fears and desires that it blurs the boundaries of reality. Fleeing an assassination attempt from Anti-eXistenZialists determined to destroy the game and its creator, Allegra finds an ally in Ted Pikul, a young executive turned novice security guard sworn to protect her. Seeking shelter within her creation, Allegra persuades Ted to play the game, and the fugitives find themselves in a phantasmagoric world where existence ends and eXistenZ begins, a fantastic place where nothing is as it seems and the villains are all too real--and all too deadly. Now a major motion picture from Dimension Films, written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, and Ian Holm.]]> Wed, 27 Oct 1999 23:01:26 +0300 The Extremes https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55246-the_extremes.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55246-the_extremes.html

British-born Teresa Simons returns to England after the death of her husband, an FBI agent, who was killed by an out-of-control gunman while on assignment in Texas. A shocking coincidence has drawn her to the run-down south coast town of Bulverton, where a gunman's massacre has haunting similarities to the murders in Texas. Desperate to unravel the mystery, Teresa turns to the virtual reality world of Extreme Experience, ExEx, now commercially available since she trained on it in the US. The best and worst of human experience can be found in ExEx, and in the extremes of violence Teresa finds that past and present combine.]]> Tue, 27 Oct 1998 23:01:24 +0200 The Adjacent https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55249-the_adjacent.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55249-the_adjacent.html

Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled to Britain from Anatolia where his wife Melanie has been killed by insurgent militia. IRGB is a nation living in the aftermath of a bizarre and terrifying terrorist atrocity - hundreds of thousands were wiped out when a vast triangle of west London was instantly annihilated. The authorities think the terrorist attack and the death of Tarent's wife are somehow connected. A century earlier, a stage magician is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy. On his journey to the trenches he meets the visionary who believes that this will be the war to end all wars. In 1943, a woman pilot from Poland tells a young RAF technician of her escape from the Nazis, and her desperate need to return home. In the present day, a theoretical physicist stands in his English garden and creates the first adjacency. THE ADJACENT is a novel where nothing is quite as it seems. Where fiction and history intersect, where every version of reality is suspect, where truth and falsehood lie closely adjacent to one another. It shows why Christopher Priest is one of our greatest writers.]]> Sun, 27 Oct 2013 23:01:25 +0200 The Affirmation https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55250-the_affirmation.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55250-the_affirmation.html

Peter Sinclair is tormented by bereavement and failure. In an attempt to conjure some meaning from his life, he embarks on an autobiography, but he finds himself writing the story of another man in another, imagines, world whose insidious attraction draws him even further in...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 1981 23:01:25 +0300 The Inverted World https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55254-the_inverted_world.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55254-the_inverted_world.html

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city & carefully removed in its wake. Rivers & mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther & farther behind the optimum & into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they're carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. Yet the city is in crisis. People are growing restive. The population is dwindling. The rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world he's about to discover is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.]]> Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300 A Dream of Wessex https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55251-a_dream_of_wessex.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55251-a_dream_of_wessex.html

A Dream of Wessex is a “story about a group of twentieth-century dreamers who create a consensus virtual-reality future. Once they enter their imaginary world they are unable to remember who they are, or where they are from.”]]> Thu, 27 Oct 1977 23:01:25 +0300 The Dream Archipelago https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55253-the_dream_archipelago.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55253-the_dream_archipelago.html

Superb interlinked collection of war-based short stories from a stunning author.]]> Wed, 27 Oct 1999 23:01:25 +0300 The Islanders https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55248-the_islanders.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55248-the_islanders.html

Reality is illusory and magical in the stunning new literary SF novel from the multiple award-winning author of The Prestige—for fans of Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell

A tale of murder, artistic rivalry, and literary trickery; a Chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems; a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you. The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. The Islanders serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands; an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder; and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator. It shows Christopher Priest at the height of his powers and illustrates his undiminished power to dazzle.]]> Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:01:25 +0300 Fugue for a Darkening Island https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/514882-fugue_for_a_darkening_island.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/514882-fugue_for_a_darkening_island.html

]]> Thu, 02 Dec 1999 15:11:26 +0200 Airside https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/666372-airside.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/666372-airside.html Airside

Hollywood actress Jeanette Marchand was beautiful, talented, beloved by audiences.]]> Sat, 11 Nov 2023 23:42:01 +0200 The Separation https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55247-the_separation.html https://reference.library.land/christopher-priest/55247-the_separation.html

Christopher Priest excels at rethinking SF themes, lifting them above genre expectations into his own tricky, chilling, metaphysically dangerous territory. The Separation suggests an alternate history lying along a road not taken in World War II. But there are complications. In 1999, history author Stuart Gratton is intrigued by a minor mystery of the European war which ended on 10 May 1941. The British-German armistice signed that month has had far-reaching consequences, including a resettlement of European Jews in Madagascar. In 1936, the identical twin brothers Joe and Jack Sawyer win a rowing medal for Britain in the Berlin Olympics: it's presented to them by Rudolf Hess. The brothers are separated not only by a twin's fierce need "to be treated as a separate human being", but by sexual rivalry and even ideology. When war breaks out Jack becomes a gung-ho bomber pilot, Joe a conscientious objector. Still they're inescapably linked, and sometimes confused. Both suffer injuries and hauntingly similar ambulance journeys. Churchill writes a puzzled memo (later unearthed by Gratton) about the anomaly of a registered-pacifist Red Cross worker flying planes for Bomber Command. Hess has significant, eventually incompatible meetings with both men. Contradictions are everywhere. As in his magical 1995 novel The Prestige Priest is fruitfully fascinated by the legerdemain of twins, doubles, impostors, symmetrical roles. Churchill's double briefly appears. So does the famous conspiracy theory that the Hess who flew to Britain with his quixotic peace deal wasn't the real Hess ring true? Clearly The Separation was impressively, extensively researched. Its evocations of bombing raids--from either side of the bomb sites--are memorable. The unfolding story strands become increasingly disorienting and hallucinatory; the easy escape route of dismissing one strand as delusion is itself subtly undermined. The Separation is filled with a sense of the precariousness of history; of small events and choices with extraordinary consequences. --David Langford]]> Sun, 27 Oct 2002 23:01:25 +0200