Ahira's Hangar

David Zindell's Neverness, A Requiem for Homo Sapiens and all things Science Fiction and Fantasy
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 Post subject: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Thu Jun 06, 2002 12:24 am 
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The main reason I liken Christopher Priest 2 David Zindell is because he's also 1 of "the best Sci-Fi authors u've never read". I have always said that Priest is the best British Sci-Fi writer 2 come along since H.G. Wells, and actually his 4th book: The Space Machine sorta pokes fun @ Wells and sort of combines The Time Machine w/War of the Worlds! I have not read Darkening Island, his 2nd book but I hear it is great and has been a cult classic in the UK 4 a long time. The 1st 3 books by Priest that I read were; The Inverted World, Indoctrinaire and The Perfect Lover (also known as Dream Lover or The Dream of Wessex). I read The Inverted World just b4 Lord Foul's Bane by Donaldson--in '77/'78 and had my mind blown open twice!!!

*The Inverted World: Christopher Priest's 3rd book and 1 I rank up there with Neverness and Dune! I really don't want 2 give it away-but I'll just say this: a huge city that travels on railroad tracks, genetically engineered incubated babies raised in a "creche", their world is not round but a hyberboyle and as u walk behind the city u get younger/older as u walk in front!!! Everybody should read this book! The only Sci-Fi I've EVER been able 2 get my Mom 2 read!
*Indoctrinaire: His 1st book, SO strange I can't even xplain it: arms poping out of the ground--ears apprearing on pyramids--strange white "aircraft" flashing in and out of the sky above the Matto Grosso in Brazil. I didn't even understand it the 2nd time I read it all I know is it's just OUTRIGHT COOL!!!
*The Perfect Lover (and a great short story collection that follows: The Dream Arcipelago): Details the Wessex Experiment and has much in common w/the movie "The Cell", but remember this was written 20 years earlier. Electrodes, and other devices r hooked up from a computer simulator 2 a team of reseachers who all float in isolation tanks. Their combined dreams merge and a "world" is created. Kinda like the "Chaos factor" in the Amber books as it's amazing how the other dreamers have 2 adjust and reconstruct the world when some1 is pulled out in real life.
*An Infinite Summer is one of the greatest short-story collections on time-travel/time phenomenon ever written.

--After these books were writen Priest went in2 a hibernation period where he edited & helped develope screenplays and vehicles 4 film. Recently he came out w/a series of new books: The Affirmation (which I hear is VERY good), The Glamour, the Prestige & The Extremes (which I just finished and liked quite alot, though it seemed 2 be geared towards "screenplay" and mass market). He also wrote a great psychological-mystery thriller called The Quiet Woman.

How far do you fall Pilot?<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 3/28/04 8:54 am
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 4:16 am 
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:"> Allright now I'm pissy! It's going on 13 months since I initially made this thread...I've reccomended Priest 2 @least 3 folk on this board and in general on Kevin's Watch and ASOIAF---The Inverted World and Indoctrinaire r some of the coolest Sci-Fi ever written!!! Like Samuel R. Delany, John Varley and Stanislav Lem. Priest is 1 of the best Sci-fi authors u've either never read, or commented upon on the site!!!:"> And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 3/28/04 8:48 am
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 4:36 am 
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Ok, Danlo, it's on my list. It better be easier to find than Zindell, tho. :"> ________________
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and cleansing I've endured within my shadow. Change is coming. Now is my time. Listen to my muscle memory. Contemplate what I've been clinging to. -Tool, "Forty-Six & Two"<i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Tue Mar 04, 2003 5:05 am 
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Syl u'll have an ezer time finding Priest than u will finding Zindell! 4 more on ur Zindell quary (query) go 2: "This is why no 1 knows about Neverness" thread in the Falling 2 Neverness 4rum!!!:"> And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 3/28/04 8:45 am
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 6:13 pm 
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Chris Priest won the BSFA award for Best Novel at the UK Eastercon in Hinckley - bit of a surprise all round, but everyone was very pleased. If you create a thing, its opposite is also created.<i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 8:22 pm 
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Though I haven't had a chance to read it yet, The Inverted World (like Damnation Alley and Vance's The Blue World) is considered to be somewhat legendary among my family. In fact, one of my brothers, who is a fantastic cartoonist and graphic designer, used the Inverted World concept in an advertisement for Rolling Rock Beer.

You can view it at www.mflinn.com/omages/omn...p?start=36 by clicking on thumbnail 001.

You might also want to check out #002 - it's pretty wacky.

His site is www.mflinn.com in case you want to check out his work in general. <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Fri May 30, 2003 1:24 pm 
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Welcome 2 the Hangar crownhawk! BTW, which book won the honors? The Prestige? And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 3/28/04 8:50 am
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Fri May 30, 2003 1:30 pm 
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Yo, Danlo - it was for The Separation. For more info go to -

www.bsfa.co.uk/

and click on Awards.

If you create a thing, its opposite is also created.<i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Sat Jun 28, 2003 8:04 pm 
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Priest not only won the British Science Fiction Association Award for The Separation but this book garnered the Arthur C. Clarke Award for excellence, as well. awards And now Danlo looked in that direction, too. He remembered that snowy owls mate in the darkest part of deep winter, and so along with this beautiful white bird perched in a tree a hundred feet away, he turned to face the sea as he watched and waited.

Ahira, Ahira, he called out silently to the sky. Ahira, Ahira<i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 6/28/03 1:05 pm
</i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2004 2:37 am 
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BLUFF YOUR WAY AS A PRIEST EXPERT!

by David Langsford 1995

INDOCTRINAIRE (1970)

Slightly abstract and surreal tale about a chap held prisoner in a version of Brazil. The most memorable sf plot device is the `live' hand growing out of a table which, during interrogations, points at our hero in a fearfully menacing way.

Priest: "It was a period. There are a couple of good bits, but unfortunately I can't remember what they are."

FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND (1972)

Disorienting cut-up-and-reshuffled narrative of nasty events in an England swamped by African refugees from a nuclear war. At the time our author was dead proud of having slipped a rogue piece into the jigsaw story, one that doesn't actually fit anywhere.

Priest: "The first book of mine about someone who misremembers things. This has become something of a theme, based on one of my own failings. Another period piece, this is the one novel of mine where one hostile review wiped out any cheerful thoughts I ever had about the book, and I haven't been able to look at it since."

INVERTED WORLD (1974)

This world really is inverted, geometrically transformed from a sphere to a hyperboloid whose equator and poles taper off to infinity (which makes Larry Niven's Ringworld look a bit puny, though later on it was topped by mathematically "bigger" infinities in Rudy Rucker's White Light). Across the distorted surface trundles a whole city on wheels, fleeing disaster.... Mindboggling stuff, shortlisted for the Hugo award.

Priest: "The best opening sentence I ever wrote (even better in French!), and in the middle of the book is the best sf scene I ever wrote. I dined out on these two bits for about ten years after the book came out. I wouldn't be able to write Inverted World now, because I'd be too inhibited and self-conscious."

REAL-TIME WORLD (collection, 1974)

Uneven collection of early stories, with two interestingly prophetic items: the grisly `The Head and the Hand', starring a performance artist who chops bits off himself before huge audiences, and the title story with its foreshadowing of later Priest preoccupations.

Priest: "This book happened because Inverted World did well. To be frank, I think it was too soon to put together a collection. But scarcity has its own dynamics, and the hardback has become by a long way the most collectable of my titles."

THE SPACE MACHINE (1976)

A cheery romp: a gentle pastiche of H.G. Wells which begins with the assumption that The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine were episodes in the same alternative history, and helpfully fills in several gaps. Much of the action takes place on Mars, and we finally learn how the Martian invaders launched their capsules....

Priest: "I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one, probably more than I should have done. For me it represents a kind of personal peak, because I wrote it in an extrovert mood during a happy period of my life, at a time when I wasn't too broke, and I was not yet feeling held back by other people putting labels on me. Everything went smoothly until publication day, when the Observer memorably observed, `Three hundred pages of homicidal tedium', since when I have written in a state of politically correct humility."

A DREAM OF WESSEX (1977)
marketed in the US as Dream Lover

The sf gimmick is predicting the future (or at least, a self-consistent possible future) by consensual hallucination in a kind of cyberspace. But the personalities of certain experimenters overshadow mere logical extrapolation....

Priest: "This novel represents a kind of valediction to trad sf, because it explicitly describes the process of futuristic imagining, then subverts the whole business. It has recently been described as the novel that predicted virtual reality, but that's because whoever said it hadn't spotted the subversion."

AN INFINITE SUMMER (collection, 1979)

A mixed bag of atmospheric short stories. Besides the much-anthologized title piece this includes "Palely Loitering" (a BSFA Award winner) and the Hugo-shortlisted, TV-adapted novella "The Watched".

Priest: "Another chunk of mid-1970s Priest, a bit raw in places, a bit soppy in others, but with a particular mood throughout that I haven't caught since."

(An Infinite Summer and The Affirmation centre on the "Dream Archipelago" venue; two more published stories with this setting exist, "The Cremation" and "The Miraculous Cairn" -- not collected with the others except in translated omnibus editions published in France and Germany. Priest: "I have been secretly hoping I might one day get a British or American publisher to do the same, but would want to rewrite all the stories first.")

THE AFFIRMATION (1981)

Indescribable. Read it! As one reviewer (oh all right, Ian Watson) noted, this book -- which only seems to end abruptly in mid-sentence -- can be re-read with a new understanding as its own sequel.

Priest: "The first of the novels to make a deliberate effort to deal in a new and realistic way with stock sf ideas: in this case, immortality. The whole novel, from beginning to end, subverts reader expectations: everything is unreliable. As a result I think The Affirmation has the best overall plot I ever wrote, and also the best and most surprising plot revelation ... on the other hand I think it has rough edges, caused by my being a bit nervous about what I was up to."

THE GLAMOUR (1984)

H.G.Wells's invisibility is physical: light somehow passes undisturbed through the invisible person. G.K.Chesterton's psychological invisibility (see his Father Brown story "The Invisible Man", which Chris insists he's never read) applies to people and things you don't notice, can't take in, have forgotten even though they're in plain sight.... The Glamour passes through this territory and goes far beyond.

Priest: "Another go at a stock sf theme: this time invisibility. Again, nothing about the novel can be trusted. I look back on this book and enjoy the plot, and the strength of the central metaphor (invisibility = memory loss), but once again I feel uncomfortable with certain short passages. The Glamour was once spoken of as a major Hollywood `vehicle' for Barbra Streisand and Christopher Walken, a fact which ten years later still has the power to make my goolies shrink in horror."

THE QUIET WOMAN (1990)

A deceptively understated tale whose backdrop is a withering extrapolation of Thatcherite excess: the media prevented from reporting the awkward fact of Southern England being partly radioactive, the barely restricted power of a now-privatized Military Intelligence, and worse.

Priest: "BBC-TV got hold of this one, dramatized it into a three-parter, hired a director, recce'd the locations ... then did nothing until the contract expired. I was sorry about this, because apart from the obvious benefits of having a book on TV, I was dying to see how they would work out the story. This has an anti-plot: on the surface it's a story of a woman surviving a nuclear accident, but as soon as you delve into it nothing is certain any more."

THE PRESTIGE (1995)

The Victorian era: and two stage magicians are deadly rivals leading strangely parallel lives. Each has his own unique version of a major magical illusion; each is baffled by the other's method; the two different secrets go beyond mere mirrors and trapdoors to be the central defining and distorting factor in their owners' lives. Compulsive stuff.

Priest: "The newest one, and therefore still a favourite. I think for the time being I'm too close to it to have any idea how it fits in relation to the others, but the usual Priest stuff about misremembering is in there, and a plot with many intricate developments. This novel, with Space Machine, is the most widely researched of my books. I must by now know more about magic than most people, but I still don't understand how tricks are done ... even when I find out."

Little known facts: Mr. Priest wrote a number of Dr. Who episodes and is close friends, and biographer of Harlan Ellison.

*****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2004 7:57 am 
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Wow! The Inverted World was already on my must-read list of course, and The Separation since it's gotten a lot of good press recently, but I've had to add several of these other ones.

I've been looking for a good tale of magicians lately, so The Prestige sounds perfect. Also, I've been collecting titles inspired by HG Wells books, so The Space Machine sounds right up my alley, too.

Also, The Affirmation and The Glamour both sound interesting. I'm seriously considering committing a bunch of white-collar crimes, so I'll have about 30 years in minimum security lock-up to actually read all the books on my list. ******************

To seek the sacred river Alph, to walk the caves of ice ...<i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2004 3:47 pm 
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*****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Mon Apr 12, 2004 8:32 pm 
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I just happen to be currently a third in The Space Machine. The tone thus far has been pretty light and the reader gets to smile a lot at Victorian sensibilities. The thing reminds me a bit of To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, except in this story the viewpoint characters are from Victorian England and not time travellers visiting it.

Thus far The Space Machine, despite being mildly amusing, is getting nowhere near Inverted World, one of the all-time greatest books in my opinion. I will report back when I finish. <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Thu Apr 22, 2004 3:13 pm 
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I just finished The Space Machine. If you compare the dates on this and a last post, you'd might think I didn't find the book to be very interesting, in which you'd be right. It wasn't without its good points, but it was a little boring and not affecting like Inverted World.

I have read neither The Time Machine of War of the Worlds as I don't find 19th century science fiction very interesting and get distracted by the errors, but the end of War of the Worlds is widely known, and it spoiled the ending for me. <i></i>


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 Post subject: Re: Christopher Priest--England's Zindell
PostPosted: Fri Apr 23, 2004 4:18 am 
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Sorta knowing how you think I think you'd like The Dream of Wessex and you'd prob really dig Indoctrinaire. I have not read The Space Machine (of any Priest books it would prob be the last I'd read judging by the synopsis). An Infinite Summer, imho, is the best short story collection dealing with "time" concepts I've ever encountered. I hate to use an adjective Zindell came very close to overusing in The Lightstone but it is "beautifully" written. *****
Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool) <i>Edited by: danlo60 at: 4/22/04 9:24 pm
</i>


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