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| Christopher Priest | |
British novelist Christopher Priest, who was best known for The Prestige and "became eminent more than once over the nearly 60 years of his active working life," died February 2, the Guardian reported. He was 80.
In 1983, he was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list that included many writers--Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, A.N. Wilson among them--significantly younger than Priest, whose career had begun almost two decades earlier, with at least 15 books and 50 stories in print by the early '80s. "He clearly felt that it was not so much the quality of his work that delayed his 'promotion' to the literary establishment, but his reluctance to deny, when asked, that he wrote science fiction," the Guardian noted.
The Prestige (1995), about two feuding 19th-century magicians, won both the James Tait Black Memorial prize and a World Fantasy award. A film adaptation by Christopher Nolan (2006) starred Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale.
Priest's other books include Indoctrinaire (1970), Darkening Island (1972), Inverted World (1974), The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance (1976), A Dream of Wessex (1977), An Infinite Summer (1979), The Affirmation (1981), The Glamour (1984), The Last Deadloss Visions (1987), The Separation (2002, winner of an Arthur C. Clarke award), The Magic: The Story of a Film (2008), Ersatz Wines (2008), The Islanders (2011), An American Story (2018), Expect Me Tomorrow (2022), and Airside (2023).
"The New Worlds/New Wave vision of a world that had lost all sense of itself, with no stories to show a way out, was inspiring: but from the beginning Priest recognized the central influence and mentoring genius of J.G. Ballard, who made hypnotic stories out of the seemingly unstoryable, for his uncanny intuition that past, present and future were an 'inner space' we must explore and live with," the Guardian wrote. "Though his works are formally more ingenious, everything Priest wrote acknowledges his mentor's foreknowledge that we now live in that inner space, where the lighting is treacherous."
Priest's literary agent, Max Edwards, told the Bookseller that the author was "a true luminary. Like his near-contemporary J.G. Ballard, a biography of whom he was writing in his final months, he achieved the rare distinction of being lauded in both the literary and speculative fiction worlds. For over half a century he gave us an imagination as brilliant as his prose. The SF scene in Britain in particular is populated by his friends and those he has mentored, and will be the smaller for his passing."
Marcus Gipps, Priest's longtime editor at Gollancz, said: "Gollancz and Orion are devastated to have lost Chris, whose extraordinary novels we have had the joy of publishing since 2011. The remarkable output of his latter years stands alongside the best fiction of any genre, and to be home to the groundbreaking titles of his earlier career as well is an honor.... His books will stand the test of time, and it has been one of the highlights of my career to be his editor and publisher."
Tomasz Hoskins, his editor at Bloomsbury, added: "His was a unique mind, and his legacy is a generation of intelligent science fiction writers inspired by his work and that of his contemporaries."