Christopher Priest (1943-2024)

Chris Priest at the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon

Christopher Priest passed away on 1st February, 2024 at the age of 80.*

He had a long career as a successful novelist, starting with Indoctrinaire in 1970. His most recent novel was Airside, published last year. He was working on a biography of J.G. Ballard which his partner, Nina Allen, intends to complete.

Other notable novels included The Affirmation, A Dream of Wessex, The Glamour, Inverted World and The Separation. His 1995 novel The Prestige was turned into a remarkable film of the same name by Christopher Nolan in 2006. He also wrote many short stories and produced a number of fanzines and fanzine articles; in one of these, he memorably tangled with author Harlan Ellison over the non-appearance of Ellison’s anticipated anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, for which Chris had written a story.

His novels and stories usually had an intelligent approach to their subject; he generally steered clear of the traditional science-fictional tropes of spaceships and robots. Nonetheless, he could rise to the occasion when his imagination could envision strange worlds. From about the midpoint of his career, many of his stories were set in a imaginary group of islands, the Dream Archipelago, which may (or may not) have been on a different world. The stories had a flavour of both the Greek and Caribbean islands, but were definitely in a unique socio-political setting. Sometimes, these stories were contrasted with our own world, or a near-future Balkanised UK. He won multiple awards both in the UK and overseas.

I first met Chris Priest in about 1977 when I was running the then Newcastle Polytechnic SF Society and we invited him to come to Newcastle to give a talk. I went to the station to meet him off the train, in the company of another fan who had met Priest before. But it was me who spotted him first, recognising him from a cartoon that had appeared in a fanzine a few weeks earlier.

Bearing that in mind, I was surprised, when he was Guest of Honour at Novacon in 2021, that I didn’t recognise him at first.

I still have a lot of his books on the TBR pile; time to move them up the stack.

*Not to be confused with the comics author of the same name.