- PRIEST, Christopher (McKenzie)
- (1943-)UK writer, married 1981-7 to Lisa TUTTLE and from 1988 to Leigh KENNEDY. He has published several novels (none apparently sf) under various pseudonyms, of which only 2 have been disclosed: John Luther Novak and Colin Wedgelock. CP began to publish sf with "The Run" for Impulse in 1966; much of his early work, which was relatively undistinguished, wasassembled as Transplantationen (coll trans Tony Westermayr 1972 Germany), appearing in English only later as Real-Time World (coll 1974).CP's first novel, Indoctrinaire (1970; rev 1979), is a bleak but fatally abstract tale of imprisonment set in the heart of an unrealized Brazil, where an unhelpful time-gate seems to lurk. His second, Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972; vt Darkening Island 1972 US), is much stronger; set in anEngland of the NEAR FUTURE, it deals with POLITICS and racial tension, focusing on the arrival of African refugees whose homeland has been destroyed by nuclear WAR. His third novel, INVERTED WORLD (1974; vt The Inverted World 1974 US), marked the climax of his career as a writer whosework resembled GENRE SF, and remains one of the two or three most impressive pure-sf novels produced in the UK since WWII; the hyperboloid world on which the action takes place is perhaps the strangest planet invented since Mesklin in Hal CLEMENT's MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954), though the characters pace through their lives with a haunted lassitude which seems characteristically British. The tale deals with paradoxes of PERCEPTION and CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and is a striking addition to thatbranch of sf which deals with the old theme of appearance-versus-reality. (The Making of the Lesbian Horse (1979 chap) is CP's spoof continuation of the book.) The Space Machine (1976) is a cleverly plotted pastiche of the work of H.G. WELLS, incorporating the author himself in the storyline (RECURSIVE SF) which proposes plot-explanations for some of the narrativegaps left by Wells in THE TIME MACHINE (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898); in its literary focus and its retrospection, the book marked, inhindsight, a significant shift in CP's work. With A Dream of Wessex (1977; vt The Perfect Lover 1977 US), CP began to write tales whose increasingly intricate plots had to be read as maps through which one explored not the world (as in conventional sf) but the protagonists. 39 human minds are meshed into a computer net which projects them (or their mental simulacra) forwards from 1983 into a VIRTUAL-REALITY world of their consensus imagination, 150 years in the future, in which they "live" without memory of the real world. The entire book is a metaphor about the creative process and its relation to solipsism. The Dream Archipelago stories assembled, with others, in AN INFINITE SUMMER (coll 1979), intensify the sense that CP's landscapes had now become forms of expression of the psyche, and are of intense interest for the dream-like convolutions of psychic terrain so displayed. The Dream Archipelago itself is a surreally unspecific rendering of England as a land half-sunk beneath the ocean (a vision perhaps influenced by Richard JEFFERIES's After London (1885), and is a powerful late-century representation of Sehnsucht (C.S. LEWIS's expression to describe a longing for something that hovers, forever unattainable, beyond the terms of reality).CP's next novels - The Affirmation (1981), also set partly in the Dream Archipelago, and THEGLAMOUR (1984; rev 1984 US) - move even more radically away from the regions of sf or fantasy. They are his best work to that point and, although representing to some sf readers an apostasy from the field, may profitably be read as explorations of ravenous psyches whose hunger expresses itself through the ingestion of or control over "unreal" (or fantasy) worlds. It might be possible to suggest that The Affirmation is a tale of ALTERNATE WORLDS and THE GLAMOUR a tale whose protagonist literally becomes invisible (INVISIBILITY); but these readings do scant justice to their intense and conscious inwardness. Though it shares a good deal of thematic material with these two, The Quiet Woman (1990) marks a decided return to the external world. Set in the near future, with radioactive contamination impinging upon the southern counties, the tale is a scathing vision of an England rapidly becoming a DYSTOPIA.CP was Associate Editor of FOUNDATION 1974-7. His anthologies are Anticipations(anth 1978) and, with Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Stars of Albion (anth 1979). In The Last Deadloss Visions (1987 chap; various revs and addenda 1987 chap; rev 1988 chap) he produced a cruel analysis of Harlan ELLISON's non-completion of Last Dangerous Visions.PN/JC
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
