Inverted World

By Christopher Priest
Afterword by John Clute

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.

Reviews

... 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 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. . . . It is a 'must.'
— Luna Monthly

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

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

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

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

Also see:

The Chrysalids By John Wyndham Introduction by Christopher Priest Like everyone else in the nuclear-wasted world he lives in, David is loyal to his kind and on the watch for anyone who deviates from the ideological or genetic norm. But what would happen if it were revealed that David himself was a mutant? Wyndham's novel is a thrilling science fiction classic for teens and adults alike.

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