3.5 ( )

A group of Earthlings living precariously on an impossible world must go to great lengths in order to survive, until they discover just how impossible their world actually is... I didn't realize a book could still take me by surprise but despite a slow first half describing the mundane day-to-day workings of an enclosed mobile city, Christopher Priest ends his novel with a one-two punch of physics and psychology that had me rereading paragraphs just to fully appreciate the twists. A sci-fi mystery that also serves as a timely allegory in this age of social polarization and conspiracy theories. ( )

Fundamentally this is an interesting and well written post-apocalyptic story. It tells the tale of a city that is constantly on the move because of what it sees as the fundamental nature of its world. When the world view clashes with another, one is left to wonder about the nature of subjective vs actual reality. ( )

This was probably a good book by 70s standards; it's still not a bad scifi and I did read it to the end (and the Grand Idea is captivating, though it had been redone several times since then); but for the modern reader, 50 years later, it also feels terribly slow, too straightforward and too dragged on - it was honestly a slug and I kept at it only for the explanation, which came too abruptly and too "told not shown" ( )

What a wonderfully executed book! The structure of the book, its pace, how it negotiates between first-person, third-person, and a more distanced narrator in one section, are all handled superbly and lend a cadence to the episodes in the novel as well.

I did almost give up halfway through Part 1, and I assume many readers might find the detailed pages—and pages and pages—of track-laying laborious. But, just as it is laborious for Helward, so, too, must it be for the reader; this is the crux of the "inverted world" and having this background allows what happens to make sense... as well as nonsense.

What I really found interesting here was how Priest handles gender and class in this seemingly organized world of the city. The social commentary here, aimed right back at late-1960s and early-1970s Britain, is unabrasive but it is also unrelenting, proving that speculative fiction can speak to social and cultural issues "on the ground," as it were.

Having not really read around much in the genre of speculative and/or science fiction apart from Atwood and some of the more canonical titles, I will say that Priest's ease at handling this material—and his talent at making it resonate and be of such immense interest—has me very eager to explore this genre in some more depth. ( )