Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)
by Christopher Priest
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher PriestAfterword: John Clute
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-22
ISBN: 1590172698
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Book Reviews of Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)
Book Review: A High Watermark of Science Fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)
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.
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