Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Christopher Priest (Author), John Clute (Afterword)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: July 22, 2008

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.
Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Christopher Priest's reissued novel Inverted World presents the reader with a city surrounded by high walls and a populace unaware that the entire polis sits upon tracks, pulled by a giant winch in order to stay ahead of a crushing, slowly moving gravity field...You feel the kind of surprise and exhilaration here that you do when a magician reveals (though they're not supposed to) the simple method behind an illusion." --Los Angeles Times

"... his well-crafted books play fun tricks on the reader. In this devilishly entertaining 1974 novel, Priest tells of a city called Earth that must perpetually move on rails to escape its hyperboloid planet's oppressive gravity." --Time Out New York

"A somber psychedelic journey through a landscape that seems a collaboration between Breugel the Elder and M.C. Escher, Priest's book is an engine of epiphany, and a formal marvel: a narrative in the exact shape of the conundrum it presents." -Jonathan Lethem

"This book shows us a community plunged into ignorance, trying to understand its place. You finish this novel appreciating our culture's efforts to protect its collective memories and also worried that everything we take for granted can easily be lost." --Los Angeles Times

"The most famous book from those days, Inverted World...upended existence, revealed a planet to be infinite, in a finite universe; between its poles, pressure warped every dimension of the body." —Guardian

"The author has created a unique and original world." -Publishers Weekly

"A marvellous thought experiment." —The Independent

"Inverted World will be remembered for many years, I would guess, as one of the few science fiction novels of the 1970s to come up with a new idea." -Foundation

"The Inverted World reads like a classic science fiction book--the physical concepts of the world in which it takes place are filled with a sense of wonder." -San Francisco Signal

"A science fiction mystery story about a world whose 'secret' is as incredible, but as acceptable, to its readers as it is to its characters --which if you think about it is one of the highest compliments a critic can pay to a novel. A well-structured, finely written, mature narrative that is very compelling and thoroughly entertaining. It is a 'must'."-Luna Monthly

"A marvelous thought experiment in which our familiar spherical world is replaced by a hyperboloid one. Rudy Rucker is equally known for his arithmetically generated science-fiction novels." -Independent on Sunday

"The story is among those seldom found, incredibly readable narratives that the reader aches to continue reading." -Jersey Journal

"One of the trickiest and most astonishing twist endings in modern SF." —Tribune (London)

About the Author

Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He has published eleven novels, three short-story collections, and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations, and children’s nonfiction. In 1996 Priest won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige, which was adapted into a film by Christopher Nolan in 2006. His most recent novel, The Separation, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Priest and his wife, the writer Leigh Kennedy, live in Hastings, England, with their twin children. 

John Clute was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1940, but has lived most of his life in England. He has won three Hugo Awards for his nonfiction. Recent work includes Appleseed, a novel, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, and Canary Fever: Reviews.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (July 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172698
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172698
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #188,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Physics of Topsy Turvy, March 19, 2011

By 

Michael Jones "Book Jones" (NW of New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Christopher Priest's science fiction master work, Inverted World could be considered a literary exercise in relativity. It's the story of Helward Mann, a citizen of the city of Earth, who as a consequence of his guild duties begins to question the purpose behind the very existence of his world. The city itself is a sort gigantic train, winched along on rails, which are perpetually being constructed, moving on a course constantly being charted; If the city fails to progress it will succumb to a mysterious crushing gravitational force. So Earth has become a self contained ever moving metropolis, where most of it's citizens are blissfully unaware of its outer environs.

The city of Earth's infrastructure is maintained wholly by its various secretive Guilds, such as the Bridge Guild, the Militia Guild, and other such groups dedicated to the mechanization and preservation of the city. The guildsmen, a class consisting only of adult males, are the elite of society. As Helward comes of age, he is ushered into their ilk, being tasked with escorting a group of young women back to their outlying homeland. The farther they travel away from the city, the more distorted the environment, and the women, become.

Priest fashions a bizzaro world in flux, alien and familiar by turns. Time speeds and slows, oceans become rivers, matter flattens and expands in spastic perspective. Everything escapes relativity. By the end of Priest's tale, all is explained with scientific elegance. Along the way, this book sucks you into its vortex, it has you scratching your head then grinning in awe-filled wonderment at the surprising plausibility of its climactic revelation. The Inverted World is a must read if not for its subtle social commentary, then for its grasp of natural philosophy, its revealing science of power.

~Book Jones~ 5 Stars

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Book Review - Inverted World by Christopher Priest, August 9, 2010

By 

The Alternative (Southeastern Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Inverted World
Christopher Priest
NYRB Classics
2008
Trade Paperback
336 pages
ISBN: 1590172698
Literary Awards - British Science Fiction Association Award for Novel (1975)

Once upon a time there was a great City known as Earth that constantly, slowly, and persistently moved ever-forward on rails towards its grinding goal to reach, or , at least, pace "Optimum." Slowly, at a tenth of a mile a day, the City slouched northward toward the horizon. To fall behind was unthinkable and deadly or so the denizens had been taught. Behind this lumbering behemoth, the Traction Guild strained to remove the ties and rails and quickly transport them to the front of the City. The Navigator Guild would send scouts great distances to determine the best routes forward. Rivers, canyons, lakes, and other natural impediments were spanned by the Bridge Guild. Protecting them all from dissident villagers along the way was the Militia Guild. So begins the quirky story of "Inverted World" by Christopher Priest.

Normally, I would label my evaluation of "Inverted World" as a classic book review since this story was first published in 1974. However, and shame on me, I did not read this marvelous work of fiction until recently and therefore I cannot in good conscience label it a classic. However, had I read it twenty or thirty years ago I think I'd have deemed it an instant classic then. The characters are believable and well-written but trapped within the confines of their Guilds. Some search for answers while others, like the City, plod ever-onward without question or purpose. Strange "distortions" follow the City and those who travel too far behind it suffer physical and temporal changes to themselves and their surroundings. The mystery of how this "world" came to be unravels slowly but expertly in Priest's hands. The main premise of the book consists of pure hard science and while the laws of physics appear to be strained at first, all is explained in the end. And, in my opinion, the wait is definitely worth it. The mysteries of the planet and the city are skillfully, although slowly, unraveled throughout the narrative and kept me interested until the very last page. If there is a flaw with this story it is that it is much too short and the open ending might have been expanded to full closure (which I won't spoil here with explanation.)

Written with compact and concise detail this too short novel drew me in from the very first paragraph and the themes of respect, responsibility, parity, warped realism, and discovery were woven together in such a way that kept me totally engrossed and my imagination working in hyper-drive. Overall I became lost in the story and its enormous sense of wonder, buildup of mystery, and ever-present suspense as Priest's portrayal of this interesting society grew. Ah, to become lost in wonder while reading... isn't that all we ever ask from any intelligent book?

4 out of 5 stars

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A High Watermark of Science Fiction, November 26, 2009

By 

not4prophet (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Amazon allows us one thousand words for our reviews. For a review of "The Inverted World", only one word is necessary, and that word is 'masterpiece'. This is the rarest of finds in the science fiction section, a book that does nearly everything right.

The City is on the move. It's a contraption a third of a mile long, featuring an odd mix of the modern, the medieval, and everything in between. Electric power is provided by a nuclear generator and sophisticated machines crank out food and clothing. Political power, on the other hand, is held by a group of guilds, each holding its own secrets and vowing death to any member that lets those secrets out. Physically, the city is moved along a sliding track by a series of winches and cables, always in pursuit of a mysterious place known as "optimum". All around them, strange tribes of primitive villagers dwell, sometimes cooperating and trading with the mobile urbanites, sometimes being hostile.

Helward Mann is thrust into this bizarre upon reaching the age of 650 miles (times is measured by the ground which the city covers) and being ushered into one of the guilds. He's eager to learn, but none of the adults are much willing to share information. The secrets of the City will only spill out gradually, and Helward's coming of age will coincide with a major crisis of identity for his city and everyone in it.

"The Inverted World" is many things: a mystery, a science fiction adventure, a bildungsroman, an introductory lesson to non-Euclidean geometry and structural engineering. Above all else, it is a fine story. Many bookstores and libraries would nominally classify it as children's or 'young adult' reading, and indeed it would be a gratifying, mind-expanding choice for any bright youngster. But it would serve just as well for an adult, or really for anyone who appreciates great literature.