Christopher Priest
Hardcover | Pages: 310 pages Rating: 3.91 | 6703 Users | 616 Reviews
List Books Conducive To The Inverted World
| Original Title: | Inverted World |
| ISBN: | 0060134216 (ISBN13: 9780060134211) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Helward Mann |
| Literary Awards: | Hugo Award Nominee for Best SF Novel (1975), Locus Award Nominee for Best Novel (1975), British Science Fiction Association Award for Best SF Novel (1974) |
Commentary Supposing Books The Inverted World
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.Specify Of Books The Inverted World
| Title | : | The Inverted World |
| Author | : | Christopher Priest |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 310 pages |
| Published | : | May 28th 1974 by Harper & Row (NYC) (first published May 1974) |
| Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction. Dystopia |
Rating Of Books The Inverted World
Ratings: 3.91 From 6703 Users | 616 ReviewsDiscuss Of Books The Inverted World
I read this in 1981 - and thinking back so many years, I realise that it was the book that kindled my love for physics based science-fiction, and how we might have to adapt if we lived under different laws of physics. It is a gem, and has hardly aged after so many years. The protagonists are well rounded, their society well portrayed, and the extrapolation of the implications of a different physics have been carefully thought through. It is obvious that this is a work that was several years inUnassuming, coming-of-age, you will say, "wait, what?" a couple of times.I really shouldn't be surprised by Priest by now. Having already read The Prestige (biggest mindblower of all) and The Adjacent, I can safely say Priest doesn't disappoint. Every book starts off with a quiet, unassuming story rooted in a reasonable, relatable reality. What throws you off is the discrepancy seeping into the plot, the little distortions in real life. Priest loves to play with perceptions, either that of the
Some science fiction books are written just to entertain, some are depiction of the authors vision of the future, and some are for conveying the authors philosophical or political ideas. Occasionally I come a across sci-fi books that are pure thought experiments, where the authors sets out to explore some outlandish idea to its logical conclusion. For all I know Christopher Priest had some other intent for the book but clearly thought experimentation appears to be the primary purpose.Inverted
You know how dumb-asses will describe something as being "like ___ on acid." This book is like if Philip K. Dick wasn't on acid. Like, if Dick had been a studious young man into engineering and physics instead of a drugged-out freakazoid. The content of Priest's novel is wacked-out and mind-bending in a sort of Dickian way, but the tone is dry and the prose is stilted (well, in that one respect it's not so far from Dick) and the details are scientific. Somehow it manages to be highly engaging
She was now a little more than twelve inches high, and her body as the other girls was nearly five feet broad. It was impossible to recognize them as once having been human, even though he knew this to be so.Well here is one of the strangest of all worlds. I shouldnt really say too much about it, as that would spoil all the fun, but thats okay because I couldnt explain it if I tried. The first 100 pages are rather dull, it has to be admitted, but after that not even the sky is the limit. Ill
Though my knowledge of SF is obviously nearly less than zero surpassed only on the downside by my understanding of science in general, Im going to hazard a few thoughts about what seems (from my point of view, at least) to be wrong with this genre.Browsing today through the Sci-fi lists of some of the GR people I follow, Im stunned to see that even those who are big, BIG readers of this genre think most of the books that theyve read are, basically..., crap (or mediocre, anyway two and three
The Inverted World is choke-full of big ideas for a relatively short book. But the real problem with this book is, towards the end, Priest turns unconvincingly realistic with his approach and hence it seems a bit rushed and a lot of things are left unexplained.I think Priest wrote himself into a corner and then seeing no way out, rushed towards a more realistic and thus an anti-climatic end. But in retrospect, I think that might have been the only way as he himself was not sure how to end the
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