Christopher Priest – Wis[s]e Words

Fugue for a Darkening Island — Christopher Priest

Published on June 26, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Fugue for a Darkening Island

Fugue for a Darkening Island
Christopher Priest
125 pages
published in 1972

There are certain protocols you have to take into account as a reviewer when discussing the books of a new, young writer. Protocols that are still in effect when the author has aged more than forty years since the first publication of his novel and has become a grand old man in the meantime, prone to gently correcting younger writers. Anything that can be said about Fugue for a Darkening Island has to be tempered by the realisation that it is a fortytwo year old novel, not necessarily indicative of the writer Priest now is.

But the truth remains that Fugue for a Darkening Island is a problematic work, a novel with its heart I think in the right place, but which features certain unfortunate themes in Priest’s work that will return in later novels, somewhat muted. I’m thinking of last year’s The Adjacent, featuring a near future Islamic Republic of Great Britain as well as the much earlier A Dream of Wessex which had parts of Britain as a caliphate, but also of The Separation and its naive story of a better world created by a separate peace between nazi Germany and Britain. In short, Priest sometimes goes for settings you’d sooner expect to see in the stories of the more reactionary Baen writers and A Fugue for a Darkening Island is one of those novels, a near future Britain ripped straight from the front pages of National Front propaganda, as the country is flooded by a never ending stream of African refugees destroying the British way of life, its hero a decent middleclass Englishman trying to find a new home for him and his family.

Rule 34 — Charlie Stross

Published on April 1, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Rule 34

Rule 34
Charlie Stross
358 pages
published in 2011

It’s only thanks to Christopher Priest’s tirade about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that you remember that you haven’t reviewed Charlie Stross latest novel, Rule 34 yet. You know that, like Halting State, which it is a sequel to, it’s written in the second person and you briefly toy with the idea to write your review the same way. But then you come to your senses and decide to write the rest of the review in a less irritating way.

Not that I minded the second person point of view in Rule 34, as Charlie Stross made it work and it fit the central metaphor of these books, reality as a massive multiplayer immersive game. At the same time I can see where Christopher Priest is coming from when he writes:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

Let’s leave out the cod psychology shall we?

Published on March 31, 2012Leave a comment

Let’s talk about Damien G. Walter’s poorly thought out attempt to understand Christopher Priest for a moment. I mentioned it in passing in my last post, but it’s wrong enough for me to want to point this out at greater length. Walter’s core argument is as follows:

Christopher Priest has spent his entire career being close enough to the top table to smell the gravy, but has never quite been invited to sit down. His writing is extremely clever, but even in the ‘literature of ideas’ that is SF, “extremely clever” is really a way of saying rather unemotional, dry, and hard to love. It has all the qualities of someone who has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page. Which, in the end, is the only thing we really demand of a novelist.

Walter also characterises Christopher Priest as having spent “most of his professional career not being J G Ballard”, as in driven by jealousy of his contemporaries and envy at their supposedly greater success, sublimated into this magnificent rant against the current generation of sf writers.

In other words, “he’s just jealous”, the most single predictable thing you can say about any critic ever. It’s something you learn on the playground and should stay there. We’re grownups now and we should be able to argue against criticism without subjecting our critics to amateur psychoanalysis.

The other idea, that Christopher Priest never quite made it as a science fiction writer is ridiculous as well. Walter’s portrayal of Priest as somebody who “has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page” is a great invention, but not true of the real Priest. Let’s leave out the strange notion that what we all want from a writer is them “getting their own soul on the page” which is a) a meaningless cliche and b) no, not what we want at all; that’s the sort of thing somebody forced to study literature in middle school would think writing was all about, not at all what real writers universally do. Some writers may feast on their own neurosises and personality, others don’t.

If you look at Christopher Priest’s career, he has always existed at the literary end of the sf spectrum and has largely followed his own path. His early 1970ties works were inspired by the New Wave but not of it, he slowly meandered from science fiction into magic realism in the eighties and nineties, returning to more mainstream sfnal themes in the last decade. He’s never really been driven by commercial considerations or any burning desire to be the top dog in science fiction, as far as I can see.

So I don’t see where Walter gets the idea from that this is what drove Priest to write his rant, when he has form for sticking his oar in. Remember the Last Deadloss Visions? Why not just take him at his word rather than invent needless psychobabble theories as to why he was driven to write this?

Priest!

Published on March 30, 20121 Comment

Whether you’re annoyed or amused by Christopher Priest’s broadside against the Clarke Award shortlist depends on how you rate the writers he attacked. For me, it was a mixed bag. On the one hand I loved his description of Sheri “genocide is too a proper tool for solving ecological problem” Tepper’s The Waters Rising:

how can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’.

Which is nicely hateful to a deserving target. But how to take his judgement of Charlie Stross:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

Charlie decided to take it as a joke and brought out a line of t-shirts to celebrate. Which is probably the best attitude to take as writer. Now you may know that I’m a bit of a Stross fan myself, but I can still see where Priest is coming from. Charlie can be quite enthusiastic about some very geeky things and if you don’t share those interests this might just be a bit wearing at novel length. But this is a question of taste more than of worth. Nobody can like every science fiction novel ever written and unless you want to argue that nobody should write novels like Rule 34, this isn’t a legitimate complaint.

His complaints about “PC Plod characters” and “och-aye dialogue” are more factual, but I find both of them unjustified. If you write a police procedural you’re bound to have coppers while Charlie has lived north of the border long enough to have a good ear for proper Scottish accents; he’s certainly no worse than a true Scotsman like Ian Rankin.

Meanwhile what Charlie Stross has tried to do with Rule 34 and in which for me at least he succeeded for the most part is to write a believable, proper near future science fiction thriller, in a future that we could actually be living in a few years from now. So for example there’s the subplot of exactly what a small time crook is creating with his illegal three-d printer/matter fab: creating highly realistic sex doll facsimiles of five year old girls for pedophiles. That is something you wouldn’t really imagine as an element of your standard near future setting, but you wouldn’t be surprised to be reading about in the newspaper in a decade or so.

So whether or not Rule 34 was the best sf novel published in Britain last year, it is a credible candidate and Priest’s irritation with Charlie’s writing style blinds him to this. Remains to argue why Priest wrote this attack in the first place, which is probably not, as Damien G. Walter wants to argue a belated jealousy of J. G. Ballard. More likely it’s just general irritation with a shortlist that ignores several worthy candidates for far weaker ones, expressed more strongly than other people might’ve done.

The Real-Time World – Christopher Priest

Published on September 20, 2009

Cover of Real-Time World

Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974

After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.

The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.