CP, Gollanczfest, Eric, new book etc

 Now that a month has gone by since Locus published a number of appreciations of Chris Priest, I think it's safe to offer up my own contribution. I could have said a great deal more, of course, but that would still only scratch the surface of the times I spent with Chris over almost a quarter of a century, on and off. His friendship meant a great deal and while our tastes in science fiction were not always aligned (but sometimes were) I took every chance to learn from him as a writer. I think his books and stories will endure and I encourage anyone who hasn't read them to take a deep dive into his work. All of it is worth anyone's time and the very best of it will leave the reader profoundly changed.

Christopher Priest – an appreciation by Alastair Reynolds

The passing of Christopher Priest leaves a monumental absence in the literature of the fantastic. CP was a thoroughly British writer in the post-war tradition, but his preoccupations were universal.

I met CP for the first time at a convention in Maastricht at the end of 2000. Any apprehension melted away at our first encounter, where CP proved kind, generous and effortlessly forgiving of the fact that I had read none of his books.

I made rapid amends, consuming most of CP’s major works up to THE PRESTIGE and THE EXTREMES, including INVERTED WORLD, A DREAM OF WESSEX and THE AFFIRMATION. My wife and I got to know Chris, Leigh and their family well, despite living in different countries.

CP was experiencing difficulties with the editorial treatment of THE SEPARATION, casting a shadow over his writing and plans for the future. I felt trusted to be kept informed of the ups and downs of the book’s grinding progress to publication. Fortunately some of the damage was rectified when Gollancz acquired the rights to THE SEPARATION and CP’s backlist, enabling the novel to find the audience it deserved. (For the sake of disclosure, Gollancz is also my publisher).

It wasn’t all frustration. This period was also an exciting one for CP, as the long-delayed film of THE PRESTIGE finally moved into production. While CP had some characteristic opinions on the artistic choices taken by Christopher Nolan with his later projects, I think he remained proud of the adaptation.

On a personal level, I was indebted to CP for inviting me along as his co-tutor on a weeklong writing course in Devon in 2004. I came away buzzing with inspiration: many writers are reticent about talking about the creative process itself, but CP relished the opportunity. I’ll cherish the many conversations we shared.

I saw too little of him in the last decade. Having had enough of post-Brexit England, Chris and Nina made the wise decision to head for Scotland. I saw him for the last time in Buxton near the end of 2021. CP looked a little older (so did we all, post-Covid) but he was still his old self in all essential respects. There was no tailing-off, no dimming of the fires, no mellowing – thank goodness.

We communicated for the last time in 2023, after I’d read EXPECT ME TOMORROW, his penultimate novel. CP was experiencing more professional upheavals, but they had come before and one assumed he would eventually battle through.

The memory I’ll most treasure will be the warmth he radiated when he spotted you across a room at some stuffy literary gathering, the slightly lopsided stride, the enthusiastically extended hand, the “All right, chief!”, and the immediate and welcome suggestion to bugger off somewhere else for drinks.

Thank you CP for your friendship, for making me feel like I had worth as a writer, and all sympathy to Nina, Leigh, Simon and Lizzy, and his many, many friends. We will miss you.

Other than wanting to wait a bit after the Locus edition had appeared, I've also been busy completing a new novel. I delivered it a couple of days after my birthday in mid-March, then immediately dashed up to London for Gollanczfest, which I think was a success as a  whole. I chaired a panel with three other writers, Esmie Jekiemi-Pearson, Natasha Pulley and Aliette de Bodard, where we talked about influences and themes in modern science fiction, and of course the new novels of all three, ranging from time-and-space hopping space operas to a nearish-future Mars. The room was packed and we seemed to have fun with our discussion, so hopefully some of that communicated to the audience. Thank you to my fellow panelists and to the audience members for their interest and the questions we had at the end. The only sour note was me mislaying my phone up on stage, then not realising I had left it there until (with another event taking place) it was much too late to go back into the room and look. Fortunately all was well in the end. From being "not a phone person" to buying my first and so far only smartphone on 2021 (because of the need to run the parkrun app), I've become totally dependent on the perishing thing. It had my train tickets, phone numbers, whatsapp contacts etc on. Grrr. Actually, I still hate phones.

The new book? It's done, barring some tweaks, and it has a title - HALCYON YEARS - which I'm not yet sure is going to be the final one. Beyond that, as I've long promised, it's another standalone entirely unrelated to anything else I've done and there won't be a sequel or prequel or anything. It's a kind of Chandleresque gumshoe murder mystery set aboard a gigantic starship (the titular "Halcyon") which is sort of like 1950s Greater Los Angeles rolled up into a tube and sent off into space. Maybe that sounds like your bag, maybe it doesn't - either way, it's about as much as I should say right now.

In other, other news, I wrote a long short story back in January. Entitled "The Scurlock Compendium", it's a period-piece with an MR James flavour, set in Suffolk just after the war, where a pair of friends who worked on radar begin to embark on a very different and troubling experiment. The piece was done for a memorial anthology in honour of Eric Brown, and will appear along with many other stories by Eric's friends from Newcon Press later this spring:

https://ericbrown.co.uk/2024/02/27/to-the-stars-and-back/

(I've linked to Eric's website because Newcon's page was temporarily unavailable at the time).

I hope you can support this excellent venture.