A collection of short stories, covering the bulk of Chris Priest’s career, from The Head and the Hand (1972) to Shooting an Episode (2017). There is an introduction, where Priest talks about science fiction, its current status, and the status of “literary” science fiction in particular (virtually ignored by the bulk of cultural commentators). Each story is bracketed by notes headed Before and After, saying how the story came to be written, and what impact it had on the author’s career and on the world in general. In a way, this makes the book a sort of continuation of the earlier collection Ersatz Wines, although it has less continuity than the earlier volume, reprinting as it does only a sample of Priest’s short fiction output.
Perhaps the longest Before and After sections are those for An Infinite Summer, telling how the story was commissioned, quite forcibly, in 1974 by Harlan Ellison for his anthology, The Last Dangerous Visions, which then never actually appeared (although Ellison’s literary executor has suggested that the book might finally appear posthumously). At the time, Priest gained some notoriety (and considerable support) by writing about his dealings with Harlan Ellison; time seems to have softened Priest’s opinions and the account of the whole matter takes up far less space than the original. Ellison died in 2018, the year before this collection appeared; Chris Priest joined the roll-call of writers who died without ever seeing their stories appear in The Last Dangerous Visions this year (2024).
Three of the stories collected here have been previously anthologised; The Head and the Hand in Real-Time World (1974), Palely Loitering in An Infinite Summer (1979), and the title story of that collection, which had previously appeared in an original story anthology, Andromeda 1 (1976). (Which means that I have all three book appearances of that story in my collection.) The other eight stories are all appearing here in book form for the first time. A number of them have elements of horror in them – mostly body horror, though the last story in the collection, The Sorting Out involves a very specific sort of horror that only very serious book collectors will recognise. A number of the stories use settings familiar from some of Priest’s novels, such as stage magicians in The Stooge, whilst Palely Loitering and An Infinite Summer use, either wholly or in part, an Edwardian (or faux Edwardian) setting, similar to that used in Priest’s H.G. Wells pastiche The Space Machine. Thinking about the likely audience for this book, I would imagine it appealing either to Chris Priest completists or people looking for an insight into the life of a writer, especially one involved in the literature of the fantastic. I don’t otherwise see it appealing to a more general reader; Priest’s writing is a bit too cerebral and the twists and hooks in the stories a little too muted for a casual reader looking for surprises.