Episodes; short stories by Christopher Priest

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.

The Gradual by Christopher Priest

We are returned to Priest’s ‘Dream Archipelago’ for this novel, which traces the career of composer Alesando Sussken, from his early life in the military dictatorship of the Republic of Glaund – one of the protagonists in the global war that the islands of the Archipelago are neutral in – through his growth as a composer, and then his life-changing trip with a cultural delegation around the islands of the Archipelago. How that trip changes him, both of the better and for the worse, is the substance of the book. Along the way, we discover more of how the temporal vortices affect those who travel between islands, and how more experienced travellers deal with this. (Of course, this may or may not have any bearing on other Priest stories that happen to be set in the Dream Archipelago; that is in the nature of things.)

The sense of life amongst the islands of the Archipelago is just as strong here, and it is contrasted with life in Glaund, an Orwellian grey townscape of concrete, industrial decay and deadening conformity. Sussken takes inspiration for his music from distant views of an offshore island that his government prefers not to talk about; he can only take that so far until his tour. Glaund also affects him in other ways; he has an encounter with the Generalissima of the military regime who commissions a work from him. The parallels between Sussken’s situation and that of Shostakovich faced with demands from Stalin for uplifting music in the service of the State, are clear.

Sussken notes, though, that prolonged exposure to the Archipelago seems to make other composers adopt more populist themes, based around folk tunes and popular marches. That he reacts against this suggests that he feels unwilling to compromise his art (though readers may reflect that this never stopped Charles Ives or Gustav Mahler incorporating such themes in their symphonies). When the Generalissima sets out the requirements for the work she commissions from Sussken, he is dismayed to find these to be the elements she demands. But as so often, it’s “art for art’s sake, but money for God’s sake”, which lands Sussken in more trouble.

The denouement ties up all sorts of loose ends, though it would not be possible without the extraordinary nature of the Dream Archipelago It is satisfying, and (unusually for Priest) has a little humour in it (also be alert for a northern English Easter egg slipped into the text). There is also a reference to one of the earlier Dream Archipelago stories, but that only adds to the sense of dislocation rather than binding the stories together in any way. This was most likely Priest’s intention.

As ever, the writing makes the events clear and the story holds together well, despite the complexities of the plot. The world of the Dream Archipelago is not out world, but neither is it at all alien. This is where the strength of the novel lies, in making the setting familiar and yet not familiar. Recommended.

God’s War by Kameron Hurley

I had been looking forward to this book for some time, based on a personal recommendation from someone whose judgement on these things is usually sound. What I found was some impressive world-building, though I got the feeling that the narrative stalled a bit when the actual plot kicked in – hey, we’re on a war-torn alien desert planet settled 800 years ago by mainly Islamic populations but of all things we get a car chase! – but it pulled itself back and I finished it with a better impression that I’d thought I was going to have. Having said that, I’m probably not going to seek out the rest of the series, but I’ll happily acquire them if I happen across them.

As I said, we are on a desert planet that has been settled for a good eight hundred years; but this isn’t Dune. The world of Umayma wasn’t settled because of unique resources, but instead because of religious politics. The settlers were all Muslims; centuries on and they have schismed and fallen into a savage war. Some Islamic traditions have survived; others have mutated – one nation has actually inverted the gender roles and now apply similar attitudes towards men and male roles that more fundamental strands of Islam apply to women in our world. But another holds to views and practices that we would recognise. Hurley identifies these, adding in overt racism and body horror. And a lot of insects. Biotechnology in this world has harnessed insects for a range of tasks, and a class of people – “magicians” – can manipulate these insects through biochemical means. (This is not magic as such but as Arthur Clarke would have said, to all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from magic, so the coinage fits well enough.)

We are propelled into the life of Nyx, a female war veteran, former assassin (or ‘bel dame’) and now reduced to various bounty hunting and black courier jobs. Her career takes a number of bad turns, and we follow her and her team into increasingly perilous situations in pursuit of a wayward “alien” (actually a off-world human in pursuit of more bioweapon materials).

As I said, the world-building on show here is impressive. The manipulation of insects is convincingly portrayed; the Muslim faith and practice is painted sympathetically, although Hurley does not flinch from challenging some practices such as polygamy or (in passing) female genital mutilation. At the same time, Islam is shown to have adapted over eight hundred or more years in a range of different ways. And we are also shown a sub-culture of female boxing which is fairly unique in contemporary science fiction.

As I said, the female assassins in the book are referred to as ‘bel dames’; I got the reference, but there’s no clues anywhere in the text or the world-building itself to point less knowledgeable readers in the right direction. (And I had to stop myself thinking of Michael Flanders gloriously mis-translating it as “the beautiful woman who never says thank you”.)

So: a violent and unsettling tale for a number of different reasons, depending on the reader’s own viewpoint. I suspect many might react badly to this, as “a novel or characters I cannot relate to”. Well, one reason I read science fiction is to be shown something outside my direct experience; and this book certainly does that.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest

Immediately before reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I had read a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the remarkable Englishman who trekked across Europe on foot in 1932 as a very young man, exploring the places, people and lives he met in those distant, pre-war years. He spent time after his walk living in the Balkans; during the war, he helped lead insurgent forces on Crete, mingling with the Cretan shepherds and (through speaking fluent Greek) mingling with them invisibly. After the war, he settled in Greece, living on the Peloponnese coast and writing about his travels on the mainland and around the islands of the Aegean. So when, through a fairly random choice, I opened The Islanders, I was ready for a novel made up of gazetteer entries for imaginary islands set in an imaginary sea, populated by artists, writers and scientists, leading lives that only seem ordinary on the surface.

The stories in this book are set in the “Dream Archipelago”, a profuse scattering of islands in a great world-sea between two warring continents in north and south. The world they are on is not ours, and yet bears outward similarities to our own. But there is much about the Dream Archipelago that is illusory. Time and space are sometimes not fixed quantities; the world of the Dream Archipelago stands at an angle to our own, and the familiar may sometimes flip over into the fantastic. At first, this is only reflected in some of the gazetteer entries and some of their handy hints for travellers that bring the reader up short; but then. as we go further into the book, we encounter stories about individual inhabitants of this world, first as historical background material and then later as individual accounts, and we see the world, and specific events in it, through different eyes. Gradually, our own perception shifts and our interpretation of events is challenged.

Priest started writing stories set in the Dream Archipelago in the late 1970s, with the first three appearing in book form in his collection An Infinite Summer in 1979. In his introduction to that book, Priest says that the stories were inspired by a holiday in the Greek islands, but that there were a number of other locations that went into the mix, especially the Channel Islands (a small group of islands just off the northern French coast, but held as the semi-feudal property of the British Crown for many hundreds of years). Indeed, Priest gives the islands of he Archipelago a legal and administrative system that seems to come directly from Jersey or Guernsey. He also said in that introduction that the individual stories should not be considered as being linked in any way; other than being set in the Dream Archipelago, they had little or nothing in common. But he kept returning to the subject, and by the time all his Archipelago stories were collected together in The Dream Archipelago in 1999, some of the earlier stories had been revised to make them fit more directly into the loose series that these stories had become. His 1981 novel The Affirmation also had segments set in the Dream Archipelago, although that part of the novel portrays the protagonist’s own psychotic retreat from his (and our) reality into a world that appears to be of his own making. But this is a game that Priest is playing with us, because in The Islanders, there are references to a novel written by a character in this book, called The Affirmation. Later Priest novels, such as The Adjacent (2013) and The Gradual (2016) are set, partly or wholly, in the Dream Archipelago. Yet it would be unsafe to think of these books as constituting a series of some sort, but rather a setting that Priest returned to as ideas occurred to him that would befit from the shared setting.

So in The Dream Archipelago we piece together some lives – and deaths – from different viewpoints, and over an extended reading, rather like the way we who read history piece together our own interpretation of events based on differing interpretations of the same events as seen from different viewpoints, or relating seemingly un-associated snippets of information that go together and make a whole story. This approach will always leave some narrative holes, whether we are reading about real events or fictional ones, but that just gives a book like The Islanders a special smack of authenticity, just like real life. It is a prime example of the sort of speculative literature that I think of as a “puzzle novel”; but in this case, there is no one answer that is right. Rather, the reader has to arrive at an answer that they personally find satisfying. For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth. And if you find this novel to have beauty, you will find truth in it, no matter how fantastic the events or how fragmentary the beauty.

Ersatz Wines by Christopher Priest

This small-press hardback is rather more than an anthology of short stories. Rather, it is an exploration by Christopher Priest of his early writing career, from his childhood – not particularly literary – through his gradual realisation that he wanted to be a writer, through early surviving stories, via his first professional sale (to Kyril Bonfigioli for Science Fantasy in 1967), through sales to Michael Moorcock for New Worlds. He finishes with a story entitled The Interrogator, which he submitted to Ted Carnell for New Writings in SF. Carnell rejected it but made constructive suggestions, sufficient for Priest to revise the story and re-submit it in 1968, whereupon it was not only published, but in due course formed the first half of his first novel, Indoctrinaire.

So this book isn’t really about the stories. Rather, it’s a personalised account of the development of a writer over a period of five years, from someone who wanted to write to a living to someone who not only did write for a living, but was able to make some (not a lot, but still some) money from it. Chris Priest was in his late sixties when he assembled these stories, and there ls an element of “grumpy old man” in his commentary, though I got the feeling that this was slightly tongue-in-cheek.

Anyone who has tried writing for money will appreciate this book. Anyone who fancies writing as a career should read it. It probably won’t put them off, but at least they won’t be able to say “No-one ever told me…”

Mind’s Eye by Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley continues his expedition into the world of techno-thrillers with Mind’s Eye, a London-based story centred around ‘glyphs’ – graphic images that lodge in the viewer’s consciousness and can induce fits or (with appropriate drug preparations) render the viewer vulnerable to all manner of suggestions, from “buy this product” to “jump from this high place”. The protagonist, Alfie Flowers, was neurologically damaged in childhood by accidental exposure to such a glyph, discovered by his grandfather in an archaeological expedition to Iraq in the 1930s: but now he has suddenly seen graffiti in London that incorporate the very glyphs that affected him, and he wants to know just how this has happened (and whether the artist can provide a cure). But he attracts the wrong sort of attention – others have seen the glyphs and see their potential. Alfie Flowers ends up in a life-threatening chase that takes him back to Iraq and encounters with his past.

The story moves at a great pace and the London setting is convincing. The graffiti art, obviously inspired by Banksy, also convinces. Alfie Flowers and the other characters are all well-drawn, to the extent that when some of them die, there is something of a sense of shock. The plot is, in equal parts, a mix of le Carré, Indiana Jones and The Long Good Friday; written in 2005, it is set contemporaneously and so the technology hasn’t dated.

My one concern is that the device of the glyphs inevitably recalls David Langford’s Basilisk stories about mind-altering graphics, especially BLIT and the 2001 Hugo-winner Different Kinds of Darkness. It is highly unlikely that McAuley was unaware of these stories – the British science fiction community is a pretty small one – but Dave Langford himself is too nice a person to mention this.

And when did the CIA stop referring to itself internally as “the Company”? Some operatives, both serving and former, make an appearance, and keep talking about “the Agency”. Is this officially a thing now?

That apart, this is a compulsive page-turner with an unusual premise and appealing characters.

The Separation by Christopher Priest

In my memorial catch-up read to bring myself up to date with all of Christopher Priest’s books, I came to The Separation. I am a sucker for alternate histories and this did not disappoint. (Warning: some spoilers may follow.)

On a dismal March afternoon in 1999, a military historian is doing a signing session in a bookshop in the Derbyshire spa town of Buxton, in the Peak District. A customer comes into the shop and offers him her father’s wartime memoirs, detailing his experiences in RAF Bomber Command. But we find that the account in the memoir seems to be from an alternate reality.

The author researches further and uncovers a story of two identical twins, Joe and Jack Sawyer, both known (confusingly) as J.L. Sawyer. In their day, they won medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics for rowing; but war separates them. One becomes a bomber pilot; the other a conscientious objector, who ends up working for the Red Cross. Both become embroiled with the defection to Britain of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess – but each has a very different experience of the same event.

But the two timelines aren’t irretrievably separated; although their differing attitudes to war cause a rift between the two brothers, their separation and those of the timelines aren’t total. Things are complicated by their relationship with Birgit, a Jewish refugee that the two brothers smuggle out of Germany after the Olympics. Both love her; one marries her. Events take tragic turns in each timeline; yet the timelines are intertwined, leading to dislocating events for both brothers.

The themes of identity and duplication re-appear here, as in Priest’s earlier novel The Prestige. We also see themes of dislocation and whether what an individual is experiencing at any one time is real or not. At the same time, Priest’s grasp of detail is very good; I detected only a handful of minor errors or omissions, no more than you would get in any other memoir of historical events written in our reality by a real person. We are treated to pen portraits of Churchill and Hess; the pacifist brother’s reaction to Churchill is interesting, as he considers Churchill to be a despicable warmonger, and yet when he hears him speak he cannot but fail to be moved by his determination and steadfastness. (There is also an account, as from the official minutes, of a key meeting of Churchill’s War Cabinet which I found very amusing.) Even these major characters display separations; Churchill uses body doubles so that he can appear be in two places at the same time, whilst JL (the pilot) sees two different instances of Hess’ flight to Britain, though there are different explanations for the events he sees.

As the novel was set, partly, in places I know well (Buxton, Bakewell and Lincolnshire), it started by giving me a great sense of presence which persisted for me through the rest of the book. There is also an account of the drafting of a major international treaty which struck me as a very likely depiction of how these things happen in real life. (I suspect that one of Priest’s sources was the diary of John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary during the war years, as he is namechecked in the book.) There is a minor loose end which isn’t adequately explained, but it’s incidental to the story and doesn’t really impact on the narrative.

Perhaps the thing that I was most worried about as the book drew to a close was the instance of Priest’s framing device, the military historian. I could not see how that was going to be closed; yet it was, in an ingenious way. I said that the alternate histories were intertwined instead of being discrete, and that might cause some readers expecting a literal or more science-fictional approach to the subject to have trouble with this book. Yet I am often struck, on looking at old films or photographs of cities, or travelling by train to another town or even another country, by all the individuals I see in passing. They all have their own lives, which I know nothing about. I see them once, and then they are gone from my view. From their viewpoint, the same could be said of me. Is not each of these lives a separate alternate reality, a parallel history affected in different ways by the same events?

The intertwining timelines in this novel have a certain inevitability about them; the parts fit together with elegance even if the impacts on the two protagonists are life-changing. I found this a most intriguing exploration of history and the effects of separations on both private lives and great events.

Tiamat’s Wrath; book eight of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey

Picking up where Persepolis Rising left off, we find the crew of the Rocinante scattered across different star systems and doing different stuff. Laconia is consolidating its position as the pre-eminent expression of humanity in the galaxy, but along with that goes a massive dollop of hubris – a scientific mission to survey many of the gate worlds is intended to find new weapons, whilst Dr. Cortázar has sold High Consul Duarte on the unquestionable benefits of life extension via protomolecule. What could possibly go wrong?

What indeed. Laconia’s belief that the gate builders have the same motivations as humans and can be manipulated by displays of force in the same way as traditional human politics suggests blows up in their collective face, just at the same time as the Sol system resistance gets a lucky break. Things go downhill from there.

This instalment definitely kept me reading on into the small hours of the morning to see what happened next! There are some sad surprises and one revolving door, but overall the story is still on target. (Though I did raise an eyebrow where Chrisjen Avarsarala’s grand-daughter commented on the old woman’s likely reaction to her Laconian state funeral and then had to explain – for the benefit of some younger readers, I suspect – the significance of “you could power a planet by hooking a turbine to her right now”…)

I’m also increasingly finding that exploring the logic of Empire is causing the writers to slip some quite important realpolitik lessons into the text, which many people, especially those who would benefit the most from such lessons, will miss because this is “just” science fiction. Sigh.

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

I haven’t read much of what is generally categorised as “military sf”, but I understand that it features ultra-competent protagonists, formal Space Navy ranks and structure, and at least one good space battle. None of these things are to be found within Ancillary Sword in quite the sort of format that the formula would demand – yet I read this with a sense that this was a proper novel of military science fiction – as long as the military you have in mind is the Austro-Hungarian army in the years immediately before the First World War, as depicted in the novels of Joseph Roth. In those books, the officers of the Austro-Hungarian army sit around a lot, admiring each others’ gorgeous uniforms and worrying about Mess intrigue, the latest affairs and Matters of Duty. And that’s pretty much what happens in Ancillary Sword.

So as an action-packed, rip-roaring tale of space war, the book comes up short. But that’s not really what we were expecting, was it? Instead, we see more of Radch space and Radch society through the eyes of Breq, the AI downloaded into a human body; we begin to understand more about what it was like to be an ancillary, a corpse soldier animated by a ship’s AI (even though we see much of that via the crew of Breq’s new ship, ‘Mercy of Kalr’, who are human but choose to behave like ancillaries); and we get to grips with more of the non-gendered languages of Radch space. Leckie’s use of the feminine pronoun no longer struck me as odd or unique; I simply imagined all the main characters as women, whether they were intended to be or not. (Oddly, I saw the ship’s troops as male, but so little male as to verge on the neuter.) The story works whether you visualise the main characters as male or female; Breq, don’t forget, is an AI, and so the concept of gender is completely immaterial to ‘her’.

And the society! Radch society remains one of the more interesting examples of world-building in current sf; we see social interactions, prejudice, status, and mourning rituals which have no relationship to any we are familiar with. And there are tea services, taking the place of Roth’s gorgeous uniforms.

I think I almost enjoyed this book more than Ancillary Sword; certainly, once the final novel in the projected trilogy appears later this year, Ancillary Mercy, I shall schedule all three novels for an early re-read – and it’s a long time since I’ve done that for any book.

Legacy by Greg Bear

This book is a prequel to the two previous novels, Eon and Eternity, looking at the early career of the Hexamon politician Olmy, and it deals with him being sent on a mission to a world that a group of dissidents opened a gate to from the Way, the mathematical space/time construct that formed the setting for much of the other two novels. As a prequel, it might be thought that it could be read as a stand-alone novel or even read first; I would not recommend that. Although the plot generally does not need a lot of knowledge of the events of the first two novels, a knowledge of the background will explain much about the motivations and mind-sets of most of the characters.

As Ser Olmy explores the world of Lamarckia, he gets more heavily involved in the politics of the dissidents; because of the nature of the Way, although only five years have passed in the Hexamon since the dissidents left, on the other side of the gate forty years have passed. Indeed, the Hexamon has become something of a myth, with a particular sect of the dissidents having come to almost see the Hexamon as potential future angelic saviours.

The main feature of the world Lamarckia is its semi-sentient ecologies, formed of continent-spanning bioforms which employ a number of different subforms to communicate, scavenge and possibly reproduce. These bioforms play a key role in the action of the plot, as one faction of the dissidents claims to have found ways to bend the bioforms and their products to human needs.

There are numerous changes in direction in the story; once we have got away from the Hexamon and the Way, it might seem that we are plunged into a classic planetary romance (indeed, at one point I found myself wishing for a map!); then Olmy signs up on board a research ship, and we’re heading off into Herman Melville territory; then finally he meets up with the leaders of the two political factions and suddenly we are in a journey such as experienced in Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now.

Of course, Bear was always going to have a problem with this story; how to bring Olmy’s tale to a close, knowing that he survives to play his part in Eon many years later? The assumption is that he will be rescued, and this is signalled some distance out from the end; yet those events are in some way secondary, and problematical because the one surviving clavicle, the device used to open gates to and from the Way, may well be lost. The answer relies on the knowledge and application of Hexamon technology in the end; and this is one point where reading this book as a standalone would not satisfy, as it’s important to know the Hexamon’s abilities in that direction to understand quite what has been going on there.

This book is important, though, for explaining a lot about Ser Olmy’s motivations in the other books of the series, especially in Eternity. It does prompt the question with me as to quite when Bear saw the idea for this book; the Ser Olmy of Eon is not as well-drawn as his much younger self is here, and this is not just another example of Bear’s novels getting more complex with time and experience. But I ultimately found this a satisfying and engaging experience.