Christopher Priest Books in Order

A scientist studying a mind-altering gas in Antarctica is taken to a mysterious plateau in Brazil and imprisoned. Interrogation and disturbing discoveries force him to question his surroundings, his captors, and his possible connection to nuclear catastrophe.

Former lecturer Alan Whitman tries to protect his wife and daughter as near-future England descends into civil war. Political upheaval and refugee movements transform ordinary life, while his family's search for safety exposes the breakdown of familiar loyalties.

Ten early science fiction stories explore strange outsiders and unsettling possible futures. A performer turns self mutilation into public entertainment, while a future prime minister faces an angry unemployed population under the growing threat of nuclear disaster.

An entire city moves across a strange landscape on rails, its engineers continually laying new track ahead. As Helward Mann learns the rules governing its survival, his experiences outside the city challenge the explanations he has inherited.

Edward Turnbull and Amelia Fitzgibbon use an inventor's machine and unexpectedly reach Mars before its invasion of Earth. Combining time travel with a Victorian adventure, their journey reveals an alien society and the threat approaching their own world.

A group of researchers creates a shared imaginary future through an experiment in collective dreaming. Once inside this apparently ideal Wessex, they lose their memories of ordinary life, complicating the relationship between personal desires and the reality they have constructed.

Released in Britain as A Dream of Wessex, this novel follows researchers entering a collectively imagined future. Their memories of the outside world disappear, leaving relationships and competing desires to shape an experiment whose boundaries become increasingly uncertain.

After losing his job and a relationship, Peter Sinclair retreats to write an account of his life. His imagined identity in the Dream Archipelago, where a lottery offers immortality, begins to blur the distinction between autobiography and invention.

Cameraman Richard Grey loses memories of the weeks before a car bombing. A woman claiming to be his lover offers conflicting explanations, drawing him toward a hidden world of people whose unusual invisibility complicates memory, desire, and identity.

In this film novelization, a military robot develops awareness after an electrical accident and escapes to avoid destruction. Its encounter with humans challenges the assumption that it is merely malfunctioning equipment as its makers attempt to recover it.

Priest investigates the prolonged nonpublication of Harlan Ellison's planned anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. This nonfiction account examines promises, editorial delays, and the consequences for contributors whose stories remained tied to an increasingly uncertain publishing project.

This polemical essay examines Harlan Ellison's delayed anthology The Last Dangerous Visions through investigative reporting. Priest considers the gap between publication promises and events, focusing on the writers affected by the long wait for their stories to appear.

Writer Alice Stockton lives in a British village affected by radioactive fallout from a reactor accident in France. When her older friend is murdered, she questions the official explanation and investigates the political secrets surrounding the death.

Two Victorian stage magicians begin a feud after a confrontation at a fraudulent séance. Their rivalry becomes an escalating contest of deception and dangerous illusion, leaving descendants to confront the secrets preserved in their accounts of what happened.

FBI agent Teresa Simons visits an English seaside town after a massacre resembling the shooting that killed her husband in Texas. Seeking connections between the events, she enters virtual-reality simulations that complicate her understanding of violence and memory.

In this film novelization, violence at a new game's demonstration sends its designer and a security guard fleeing. Entering increasingly elaborate virtual worlds, they struggle to distinguish genuine danger from the disturbing realities created by the game's biotechnology.

The Dream Archipelago offers neutral territory amid a world at war, drawing young men from both sides of the conflict. Interconnected stories and novellas explore relationships, shifting realities and the uneasy effects of war within the islands.

Identical twins Joe and Jack take different paths through the Second World War, one a pacifist ambulance driver and the other a bomber pilot. Their shared love for a Jewish refugee intertwines with conflicting possibilities for Britain's wartime history.

This nonfiction collection brings together decades of Priest's essays, reviews, and reflections on writers and books. Subjects include science fiction, literary plagiarism, H. G. Wells, publishing frustrations, and unresolved wartime mysteries, revealing recurring concerns across his critical work.

This collection gathers Christopher Priest’s previously uncollected short stories, bringing together work that had not appeared together in book form.

Priest examines the transformation of his novel The Prestige into Christopher Nolan's film. Following the process from the book's conception to the finished adaptation, he considers how different storytelling forms alter secrecy, rivalry, and the demands of narrative.

Presented as a guide to the shifting islands of the Dream Archipelago, this novel combines travel descriptions with an elusive murder mystery. Artistic rivalries and contradictory accounts complicate the authority of a narrator whose own legacy is uncertain.

Photographer Tibor Tarent returns to Britain after a devastating weapon kills his wife. His story intersects with a wartime magician's secret mission and a physicist's discovery, linking grief, invisibility, and the consequences of manipulating matter across different eras.

Composer Alesandro Sussken lives under a military dictatorship that forbids knowledge of distant islands. Unexpectedly permitted to tour them, he discovers unfamiliar relationships between travel and time that challenge his understanding of his homeland, his family, and his music.

Ben Matson believes he lost his partner in the September 11 attacks, though uncertainties remain about her journey. Years later, a chance encounter and news of an unidentified aircraft wreck revive questions about memory, loss, and the story he accepted.

This collection pairs eleven short stories with Priest's commentary and reflections. Stage-magic horror, time-slip accidents, an impossible romance, and contemporary satire explore shifting realities and human relationships across fiction ranging from science fiction to realism.

Crime writer Todd Fremde visits Dearth for a conference and finds a supposedly crime-free island with armed police. Questions about time, his reception, and an old murder on his home island draw him into an increasingly unsettling investigation.

Two pairs of twins, a nineteenth-century thief, and a former police profiler in 2050 become linked across changing climates. An experimental implant and questions about family history connect lives separated by centuries and seemingly unrelated events.

Hollywood actress Jeanette Marchand flies to England during a personal crisis and vanishes before anyone sees her leave the airport. Years later, a film student investigates her disappearance, questioning what happened aboard the flight and after its arrival.

Christopher Priest’s biography of J. G. Ballard examines the life and imagination behind his unsettling fiction. Completed by Nina Allan after Priest’s death, it also becomes a reflection on their shared love of Ballard, loss and the passage of time.

Essays and talks trace Christopher Priest’s life as a writer and reader, from the science fiction New Wave to the filming of The Prestige. Reflections on stage magic, H. G. Wells and wartime history reveal recurring interests behind his fiction.