A review by gregbrown
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
4.0
Every book I read by Christopher Priest makes me enjoy his writing more; The Adjacent is my third experience (after The Prestige and Inverted World), and it certainly won't be my last.
He's a sci-fi novelist, but unlike most of the good writers I enjoy who love to take an idea and work out the systemic implications, Priest focuses almost entirely on the subjective experience of the strange. In Priest's books, the science-fiction aspect is almost always an aberration, a malignant presence that never sits quite right within everything else and almost always leads to bad results. The Adjacent's sci-fi hook becomes pretty obvious by midway through the novel—even if it isn't revealed outright until the end—but Priest is never really about the twist, except where the subjective experience is actually the big reveal.
Oddly enough, reading the The Adjacent reminded me a lot of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: the numerous vignettes loosely linked, war and history looming over the other storylines, and occasional dream-logic that still feels plausibly rendered. The other big comparison is The Lost Books of the Odyssey for the way those stories seem to echo each other—generated by the common departure point for that story collection, but for other reasons here.
Anyways, pretty cool book and one that I'll probably upgrade to five stars after some distance. It's always nice to read big boy sci-fi.
He's a sci-fi novelist, but unlike most of the good writers I enjoy who love to take an idea and work out the systemic implications, Priest focuses almost entirely on the subjective experience of the strange. In Priest's books, the science-fiction aspect is almost always an aberration, a malignant presence that never sits quite right within everything else and almost always leads to bad results. The Adjacent's sci-fi hook becomes pretty obvious by midway through the novel—even if it isn't revealed outright until the end—but Priest is never really about the twist, except where the subjective experience is actually the big reveal.
Oddly enough, reading the The Adjacent reminded me a lot of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle: the numerous vignettes loosely linked, war and history looming over the other storylines, and occasional dream-logic that still feels plausibly rendered. The other big comparison is The Lost Books of the Odyssey for the way those stories seem to echo each other—generated by the common departure point for that story collection, but for other reasons here.
Anyways, pretty cool book and one that I'll probably upgrade to five stars after some distance. It's always nice to read big boy sci-fi.