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Christopher Priest
Birth at
14 July 1943
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English prose writer, one of the leading representatives of the younger generation of the British NF. Born in Cheadle (Cheshire), after graduation he studied as a clerk and worked as an accountant, an auditor in a ready-to-wear warehouse, and then in a trading firm; in 1973-78 he read a NF course at the University of London; since 1968 - a professional writer. The first publication was “Run” (1966). In 1981, he married (second marriage) L. Tuttle, and in 1987 (third marriage) Lee Kennedy, also a
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English prose writer, one of the leading representatives of the younger generation of the British NF. Born in Cheadle (Cheshire), after graduation he studied as a clerk and worked as an accountant, an auditor in a ready-to-wear warehouse, and then in a trading firm; in 1973-78 he read a NF course at the University of London; since 1968 - a professional writer. The first publication was “Run” (1966).
In 1981, he married (second marriage) L. Tuttle, and in 1987 (third marriage) Lee Kennedy, also a writer. Lives in a village in gr. Wiltshire.
Named a critic in 1983 "one of the twenty best young British novelists", Priest published relatively few short stories; almost all of them are included in the collections "The World of Real Time" [Real-Time World] (German 1972 - Germany; 1974) and "Infinite Summer" (1978); in the story "Discourse" (1979; Brit. prize NF-80) describes a love novel in a real world; "The most disturbed" by the author's history (1978); "The most disturbed" by the author's story and "fotted" (1981); . .
After the inconspicuous first novel "Indoctrinaire" (1970, esp. 1979), Priest drew attention with a novel about England of the near future, in which a political and racial conflict is brewing due to the invasion of immigrants from the African continent, especially suffered as a result of nuclear war - "Fugue to a darkening island" (1972; others - "Darkening Island"). However, the greatest success fell to the lot of the novel “The Inverted World” (1974; British Prize NF-75; rus.1985; 1985), which takes place in a mysterious city on wheels, wandering on the surface of an even more mysterious hyperboloid planet, designed by the author with rare imagination and scientific persuasiveness. Having experienced many adventures and actually embarked on the path of struggle with the social caste structure of the city, the hero in the final found that the reality surrounding him turns out to be a carefully assembled illusion: the city actually moves on the surface of the Earth, almost depopulated after an environmental disaster; the illusion of another planet was originally created by the builder of the city to turn the community of the chosen into a closed, cut off from earthly life utopia. Psychologically accurate and realistic in detail, Priest's novel presents one of the most striking examples of a conceptual upheaval in modern NF. Also successful was the creative imitation and the original “continuation” of G. Wells – stylized under the Victorian scientific romance “The Space Machine” (1975; Russian 1979), in which the “closed” two plots – “Time Machines” and “Wars of the Worlds” appear in the final chapters as one of the characters.
The subsequent books of Priest marked the departure of the author from the themes and problems of the traditional NF in the field of “simple” literature (in its modernist understanding); his characters mainly “sort out” their psyche and surrounding reality, questioning the latter and most often finding a welcome refuge in the Dream Archipelago from the tribulations of the real world. The novels - "The Dream of Wessex" (1977; others - "The Perfect Lover") and "Charm" (1984) are written with undoubted literary skill (and with the undoubted influence of writers such as H. Borges and F. Dick); their characters live in a "superreal" parallel world, opposed to reality. In the first novel, the world is a collective projection of the consciousness of 39 individuals, realized by a super-powerful computer; in the latter, escape from reality is achieved through invisibility. The novel "The Quiet Woman" (1990) takes place in a radioactively "contaminated" England of the near future, irresistibly becoming a benchmark dystopia