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Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics) Kindle Edition
Winner of the British Science Fiction Award
Nominated for the Hugo Award
The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York)
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and 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 crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and 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 is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNYRB Classics
- Publication dateDecember 12, 2012
- File size1017 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—Los Angeles Times
“... his well-crafted books play fun tricks on the reader. In this devilishly entertaining 1974 novel, Priest tells of a city called Earth that must perpetually move on rails to escape its hyperboloid planet's oppressive gravity.”
—Time Out New York
“A somber psychedelic journey through a landscape that seems a collaboration between Breugel the Elder and M.C. Escher, Priest’s book is an engine of epiphany, and a formal marvel: a narrative in the exact shape of the conundrum it presents.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
“The most famous book from those days, Inverted World...upended existence, revealed a planet to be infinite, in a finite universe; between its poles, pressure warped every dimension of the body.”
—Guardian
“A unique and original world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A marvellous thought experiment.”
—The Independent
“Inverted World will be remembered for many years, I would guess, as one of the few science fiction novels of the 1970s to come up with a new idea.”
—Foundation
“The Inverted World reads like a classic science fiction book--the physical concepts of the world in which it takes place are filled with a sense of wonder.”
—San Francisco Signal
“A science fiction mystery story about a world whose ‘secret’ is as incredible, but as acceptable, to its readers as it is to its characters—which if you think about it is one of the highest compliments a critic can pay to a novel. A well-structured, finely written, mature narrative that is very compelling and thoroughly entertaining. It is a ‘must’.
—Luna Monthly
“A marvelous thought experiment in which our familiar spherical world is replaced by a hyperboloid one. Rudy Rucker is equally known for his arithmetically generated science-fiction novels.”
—Independent on Sunday
“The story is among those seldom found, incredibly readable narratives that the reader aches to continue reading.”
—Jersey Journal
“One of the trickiest and most astonishing twist endings in modern SF.”
—Tribune (London)
About the Author
Christopher Priest is the author of ten novels and two collections of short stories, including the prize-winning THE GLAMOUR and THE PRESTIGE which won the James Tait Black award in 1995. He lives in Hastings with his wife and twin children.
Product details
- ASIN : B009MY9QZK
- Publisher : NYRB Classics (December 12, 2012)
- Publication date : December 12, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1017 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 324 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #386,903 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #344 in Steampunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #3,525 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- #3,540 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
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It’s impossible to talk about the book without spoiling things, but this is due to the structure of the story and I’m seeing this as a bit of a fault. Or, I think I do. This book is all bread crumbs until the end. The only real conflict is shared between our main character and the reader: basically, what the hell is going on? And I’m not sure that’s a real conflict. It’s only a “reason” to keep reading. If the book started by laying everything out for you in the beginning the rest wouldn’t be all that interesting.
I suppose you could compare this to something like 1984, where our main character senses the world isn’t as it seems and perhaps he’s been given a narrative he needs to expose. But in 1984 we get incredible world building. There’s not much of that here, and if there is it’s all sort of revealed in a very plain way.
But as I type this, I realize I can’t quite stop thinking about what this book is trying to say about our real world and the nature of those that govern Vs the ones that are governed. The idea of keeping your head down and just continuing to do things because that’s the way they’ve been done. Maybe I’m not giving the story enough credit.
Either way, I’m very happy to have found another example that sci fi isn’t always lasers and space ships. No matter what I recommend reading this one just because of how unique it really is.
Not so in Christopher Priest’s Inverted World. Not by a country mile. This is a novel, hard on the science but soft on the soul. This is a novel already approaching the half century mark but feeling like it will be written in the 2020’s. This is a novel with an A-list idea, but not C-list tricks, no magic, no dei ex machina, no easy 21st century cop outs.
What Christopher Priest has packed in 300, other writers would need 300 thousands of pages. Where to start? From the “optimum”? From the “City” on rails? From going “South”? From the protagonist Helward Mann who, unable to grasp, comprehend and embrace change reminds us of every one of us in this pre-Singularity era?
You don’t need to be a scientist to immensely enjoy Inverted World. Human will do. Get this gem.
Having said that this book totally sucked me in. I read it more or less straight through (I can't remember the last time I did that with a book) and then I read it straight through again (never done that). I am surprised that there has never been a film but there again Rendevous with Rama hasn't made it to the silver screen yet either. Priest builds a quite plausible little world out of a completely implausible situation.
Top reviews from other countries
Ich weiß nicht, ob ich das Buch als "spannend" bezeichnen würde. Spannend im Sinne von "actiongeladen". So furchtbar viel geschieht in Inverted World gar nicht, aber die Atmoshpäre ist so dicht, die Geschichte so sonderbar, dass ich immer wissen wollte, wie es weitergeht und das Buch an 2 oder 3 Tagen verschlungen habe. Ein Grund ist sicherlich, dass man als Leser ständig rätselt. Wo befindet sich die Handlung? Wie sieht diese Welt aus, die da gezeichnet wird?
Es gibt genügend Bücher und Geschichten, die man liest, die spannend sind, in denen ständig irgendwas passiert, am Ende aber nur bruchstückhaft hängen bleiben. Ich habe Inverted World vor einigen Wochen gelesen und muss immer wieder an die Atmosphäre in dem Buch denken.
Kurzum, mir hat es sehr gut gefallen. Klare Kaufempfehlung. Übrigens habe ich die Auflösung im Buch als zufriedenstellend empfunden. Jedenfalls wird besser aufgelöst als in so manch verwirrendem Buch von Philip K Dick (von dem ich ein großer Fan bin).
This is an absolutely superb novel - and I'm not entirely sure why it's been so neglected until now.
The main character, one Helward Mann, comes of age at the start of a novel and, following in his father's footsteps, joins the "Futures Guild." It's quickly clear that the world his people inhabit is an extremely unusual one. The details of this are drip-fed to the reader as Mann learns more about his world: essentially the (high) concept is their world is an infinite world within a finite one.
The plot itself is well-handled; Mann travels as far as he can in order to discover (and reveal to us) why things are the way that they are. This is done in beautifully spare prose. It never feels at any stage as though any words are wasted. Which is pleasant in of itself; it has the pleasing effect of making this an almost poetic novel (indeed Adam Roberts, in the introduction, reflects on the inherently poetic nature of the infinite within the finite). One does suspect that in a lesser author's hands we could have ended up with a horribly bloated doorstop of a fantasy novel.
There *is* a twist. Helpfully, they tell you this on the front cover...argh!
Finally, although this was written in 1975, I don't feel that it has dated particularly badly. What technology there is isn't central to the working of the novel and the concept itself (though fairly dubious) though central to the novel doesn't feel particularly bound by any time.
Enjoy!