I grew up reading science fiction, so for me, from the beginning, Christopher Priest was one of those distant, enormous figures who couldn’t possibly be mortal, somewhere beyond the sea where those writers lived on their Mount Olympus. We had his early books in translation. I didn’t get on much with The Space Machine, and struggled with the ending of Inverted World (Ned Beauman is very funny about Priest and endings in the LRB from about a decade ago). A Dream of Wessex (translated as “The Dream in Castle Maidan”, if I remember right, and by Emanuel Lottem, whose own obituary I had to write only recently), however, left what seems in hindsight an indelible mark on my young writer’s mind.
I have a vague recollection of meeting Priest at an early SF convention I went to, one of those fleeting encounters, when one is inevitably too shy to say anything anyway. Then came Osama, my 2011 novel, and waking up confusedly one day to messages about Priest’s extraordinary tirade about the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Priest did not approve of that year’s shortlist (to put it mildly), eviscerating several of the nominees and instead suggesting several alternatives for the prize, including Osama.
I found the whole piece very funny (admittedly, I wasn’t – yet – on the receiving end of Priest’s ire), and for a while my agent introduced me as the guy who wasn’t nominated for the Clarke, which was also very funny. The piece caused a furore in the small world of science fiction, and drew some welcome attention to Osama, which was rejected by numerous publishers before landing with the small but loyal PS Publishing. (When I won the World Fantasy Award for it later in the year Priest e-mailed his congratulations, concluding “I always knew people would see the light in the end.”)
As a consequence of this, I got to meet Priest several times over the next couple of years, and exchanged a few e-mails here and there. I was also, as a reader, extremely taken with the novels he was producing in this later stage of his career, beginning with the marvellous The Islanders (2011), of which I have an inscribed copy. I also caught up with much of his earlier fiction at that time (the only one I never managed to get to grips with is The Separation). I have a very fond memory of Priest wandering into a convention hotel in Heathrow Airport shortly after his Clarke Award piece. He strode in like a gunslinger, clearly delighted at the fury he’s caused. He was a delight in person, smart, funny, engaged, always full of funny stories (the one about meeting Michael Caine at the premier for The Prestige is endlessly funny). It occurs to me that my repeat here of both “delight” and “funny” would have caused him consternation. To make up for the kind words for Osama, Priest took equal delight in eviscerating my next novel, The Violent Century. I was, needless to say, incredibly flattered. (“Tidhar’s style is not half bad when he can be bothered to write properly” is perhaps the nicest thing he has to say in it). Every time since, when I’ve had occasion to use “alright” instead of “all right” in a book I would tell myself I’m only doing it to upset him.
Sadly for me, Priest shortly moved to Scotland and I stopped attending UK convention, so I didn’t get to see him, though I kept up with his books, which is all that matters in the end. Our last e-mail exchange must have been while I was working on A Man Lies Dreaming. Priest had a huge World War II library and I was in need of some recommendations. It seems appropriate, with our shared interest, that my last e-mail to him is just titled “Hitler?” and my final note is simply:
i can’t even figure out if hitler really only had one testicle… historians are split on that score and the only hard evidence is the russian autopsy report, which could well be fake. it would have been useful to know for sure… 🙂
I never did figure out the Hitler testicle question, but I did finish A Man Lies Dreaming which, I guess, owes some of its origin to that long-ago read of A Dream of Wessex and its constructed realities or, at least, I’d like to think so as I’m writing this now.
Priest’s legacy is hard to envision. He never much broke America. His last few books in the UK were published with little to no fanfare, the book market changing in fundamental ways around him. He seemed more popular in France than he was in his home country. I sometimes think simple longevity is the hardest thing in the world for a writer to achieve, and Priest did that, for decades of first-rate work. I can only hope his work continues to be celebrated into the future. Many of the obituaries mention his work as writer, editor and occasional polemicist (his epic book-length takedown of Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions anthology being a case in point). He was also, as it turns out, and very quietly, an agent on behalf of many deserving writers, and was the guy who sold William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Gollancz in the UK.
I was sad to hear of his death this month. I still have Airside to read, and I’d like to do a deep dive into his short fiction one day soon, as I’m obsessed with the one he wrote about Richmond Bridge.
Needless to say, I adored him.
Lavie Tidhar 