the inverted world by christopher priest

He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. But the world-he is about to discover-is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.Ĭhristopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. 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. 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. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. The only alternative to progress is death. 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. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers.

Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes.

The inverted world by christopher priest