4) The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

Haven’t read a lot of Christopher Priest – I know three of his earlier books, being a bit underwhelmed by Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex , but totally blown away by Inverted World. And The Separation was one of the first books I blogged here, back when I was still getting into it. But with the coming con I thought I should renew my acquaintance with his work.

I wondered at first if The Prestige actually had any sfnal content at all, or if it was going to qualify as genre only in the same way as The Syſtem of the World. But by the end of the story it’s pretty clear that this is science fiction, though in a particularly creepy and eerie way; the story of two rival stage magicians at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, combined with the technology of Nikola Tesla, and all kinds of questions about family secrets and unreliable narrators. I really enjoyed it.