Christopher Priest (1943-2024)

Author, editor, and scholar Christopher Priest, 80, died of cancer February 2, 2024, in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in Scotland. He was a major figure in the SF field, famed for his ambitious fiction and erudite criticism and non-fiction.

Christopher Mackenzie Priest was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, England on July 14, 1943. Priest was married to author Lisa Tuttle from 1981-87, and to writer Leigh Kennedy from 1988-2011. He married his longtime partner, author Nina Allan, in 2023; she survives him.

His first work of SF interest was “The Run” in 1966. Other notable stories include Hugo Award finalists “The Watched” (1978) and “Palely Loitering ” (1979); the latter won a British Science Fiction Society Award. Some of his short work was collected in Real-Time World (1974), An Infinite Summer (1979), Ersatz Wines: Instructive Short Stories (2008), and Episodes: Short Stories (2019).

Priest’s debut novel Indoctrinaire was published in 1970. Other SF novels include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972, also published as Darkening Island) and BSFA Award winner and Hugo Award finalist Inverted World (serialized 1973-74), A Dream of Wessex (1977, also published as The Perfect Lover), The Glamour (1984), The Extremes (1998), The Quiet Woman (1990), Arthur C. Clarke Award winner The Separation (2002), The Adjacent (2013), An American Story (2018), Expect Me Tomorrow (2022), and Airside (2023).

His 1995 novel The Prestige was adapted as a feature film by director Christopher Nolan in 2006; Priest wrote about the rather fraught experience in The Magic: The Story of a Film (2008).

The strange and ambitious Dream Archipelago series includes linked collection The Dream Archipelago (1999) and novels The Affirmation (1981), Campbell Memorial Award winner The Islanders (2011), The Adjacent (2013), The Gradual (2016), and The Evidence (2020).

He was associate editor at Foundation from 1974-77, and edited anthologies including Anticipations (1978), and Stars of Albion (1979, with Robert P. Holdstock).

His non-fiction includes Your Book of Film-Making (1974), Seize the Moment: The Autobiography of Britain’s First Astronaut (1993, with Helen Sharman), The Song of the Book (2000), and “It” Came from Outer Space: Occasional Pieces 1973-2008 (2009). The Last Deadloss Visions, his scathing discussion of Harlan Ellison’s not-yet-published anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, appeared in 1987, with various updates over the years; the 1994 update, The Book on the Edge of Forever, was a Hugo Award finalist. Priest was nearly finished with a non-fiction book on the works of J.G. Ballard when he died.

His work was explored in Nicholas Ruddick’s Christopher Priest (1990), Andrew M. Butler’s anthology Christopher Priest: The Interaction (2005), and Paul Kincaid’s The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest (2020).

For more, see his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.