Second paragraph of third chapter (an interview with Priest himself):
I was born on Bastille Day, 1943, so I must have been conceived at the end of October 1942. (My parents’ wedding anniversary is 31st October, which probably explains a lot.)
As stated here over the years, I was a friend and a fan of Christopher Priest (see here, here and here), but for some reason I had not got around to buying the book of essays about his world produced for Interaction, the 2005 Worldcon, at which he was a Guest of Honour. But I put that right at Eastercon a few years ago and have now got around to reading it.
There are a dozen essays in the 160 pages of the book, and I know the authors of about half of them. It’s interesting that the writers, who were no doubt given specific and different briefs, keep coming back to the same works and themes (and this was before the film adaptation of The Prestige came out): binaries, negotiated realities, the nature of fiction. The one book of his that I have not read that seems particularly interesting is The Quiet Woman.
There are a couple of rogue chapters which look at his work outside the well-known run of novels – one on his criticism (often trenchant), and one on the book adaptation of David Cronenburg’s film eXistenZ. I don’t know if it was widely known in 2005 that he had also written the novelisations of Mona Lisa and Short Circuit; it would have been interesting to contrast the three adaptations.
One other point that I would have liked to see explored is Priest’s screen writing. The story of his two failed Doctor Who stories is well known; less well known, he did get a small number of scripts produced, listed on IMDB – though admittedly only two of these were before 2005, “Treason”, a 1981 episode of Into the Labyrinth and Love: The Watched in 1984, both of them for younger viewers (who one doesn’t think of as the target audience for Priest’s prose). You can watch the Into the Labyrinth episode below. It stars Pamela Salem and Ron Moody as the baddies.
I was puzzled by the order of the chapters, and would perhaps have put the interview either immediately after the introduction or at the end, and similarly I might have put the chapters on the novelisation and on non-fiction together at the end, so that all the chapters on the novels were together. I know that these things are often pulled together in haste.
Anyway, you can get Christopher Priest: The Interaction here (at a price).
This was the shortest book that I acquired in 2023 and had not yet read. Next on that pile is Lost, Found, Remembered, by Lyra McKee.
