Second paragraph of third essay (“Ersatz Wines”):
To be a writer is in fact a fairly common ambition – in a recent survey by YouGov, sixty per cent of British adults said that they wanted to become an author, and not as a casual dream but as a wish for a career. An equivalent survey in the United States revealed an even higher rating: eighty-one per cent of adults questioned felt they had a book in them, and that they should or would write it. In the USA there are approximately one-and-a-half million people who run or conduct courses in creative writing, providing tuition for more than twenty million students. The success of book groups and writers’ circles also underlines what a persistent aspiration authorship is for many people. Most of them will inevitably not achieve the dream, although in these days of internet publishing and print-on-demand, many more will do so than would have been able to in the past.
This is a book of non-fiction essays by the late great Christopher Priest, mostly (but not only) about the craft of science fiction and writing, with some autobiography thrown in. The publishers kindly sent me an advance copy in the expectation that I would review it here – normally I reject such requests (I get half a dozen or so every year), but in this case I was more than happy to oblige.
There are 16 pieces in 300-plus pages here, but they vary wildly in length. The longest single piece, a reflection on Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of his novel The Prestige, is almost a hundred pages. The shortest, about his life in a flat in Harrow from 1969 to 1985, is only four pages long.
Most readers will hope to get insights about Priest’s own career from this collection, and they will not be disappointed. The early autbiographical pieces are fascinating and add to the work of Paul Kincaid. The very first piece, about an unrequited teenage love, is especially moving; it was apparently the last to be written. He writes a lot about other people’s writing, but he also writes a lot about his own, disarmingly frank about the limitations of his analysis.
I don’t know how to write a book. I don’t even know how to write one of my own books.
The key to his own thinking about sf is probably best expressed in “‘It’ Came From Outer Space: The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976 by Lester Del Rey”, which brutally dissects Del Rey’s choices and commentary in a now forgotten anthology (56 ratings on Goodreads, which is close to nothing for a book almost 50 years old). Priest always wanted science fiction to be ambitious and outward-looking; he writes of Del Rey’s
major fallacy… that the creation of the genre magazines by Hugo Gernsback and his imitators in the 1920s and ’30s was a good thing.
He pushes back against narrow interpretations of the genre in several of the other pieces too (most notably in his 2000 Novacon Guest of honour speech) but this is its crispest expression.
He’s very funny about his own early career, though his remarks about Michael Moorcock are pretty salty, to the extent that Nina Allan notes in the foreword that the two of them reconciled at the end. At his very first science fiction convention, he is upstaged by Terry Pratchett:
To my not entirely impartial eyes, Terry seemed to be getting a disproportionate amount of recognition for a single short story, “The Hades Business”, which had appeared in an anthology, having first been published in his school magazine. Terry was then only fifteen years old; he was short and slight, had a mass of bushy dark hair, and spoke in a rather distinctive treble. I, with my writing light hidden under a bushel, could hardly complain that he was getting more attention as a promising young writer than I was, but even so I felt annoyed with him. I privately resolved to outdo him one day, but never in fact did so …
I wrote last year about Priest’s relationship with Doctor Who. One surprise here was a personal reminiscence of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan, and was a neighbour in the Harrow years:
Marter, whom I found pleasant but distinctly odd, once advised me to wax my car because he said it would help strengthen it in the event of a head-on collision (or, presumably, a tree branch falling on it).
The long piece about the filming of The Prestige is interesting even for those (like me) who have not actually seen the film. Although Priest claimed to be fully stiff-upper-lip about it, he was clearly very emotionally invested in his own story and in what was done to it, and the reader will cheer on his behalf when he is generally pleased (to put it mildly) with the result.
It’s (almost) all worth reading. My one reservation is a 2002 piece supporting the conspiracy theory that Rudolf Hess was secretly replaced by a double. Perhaps it’s useful as an illustration of Priest’s interest in doubles and hidden histories, but I think an editorial note should have been added to say that the duplicate Hess theory, improbable in the first place, was conclusively disproved by DNA testing in 2019. Priest also had odd ideas about 9/11, but luckily doesn’t seem to have committed them to writing, or at least not to writing printed here.
But we’re on much more solid ground with the final piece, his Guest of honour speech from the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow, where he again restated his theory of the genre:
Long ago, I realised that whenever someone says “Science fiction IS”, or “Science fiction SHOULD BE”, I immediately start thinking of exceptions to that rule. Those exceptions are almost invariably stuff I like precisely because it can’t be pinned down. What we call science fiction as a kind of unified lump should consist of a literature of unexpected ideas, found in individual works, written by individual writers in individual ways. The rest is hackwork.
Even those who don’t know Priest’s work will probably enjoy the insights into the creative process that he gives here. For those of us who did know the man and his writing, it’s an essential volume. You can get The Recollections here (starting next month).
