The Extremes (GOLLANCZ S.F.) - Softcover

Christopher Priest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575075783 ISBN 13: 9780575075788

Publisher: Gollancz, 2005

Synopsis

British-born Teresa Simons returns to England after the death of her husband, an FBI agent, who was killed by an out-of-control gunman while on assignment in Texas. A shocking coincidence has drawn her to the run-down south coast town of Bulverton, where a gunman's massacre has haunting similarities to the murders in Texas.

Desperate to unravel the mystery, Teresa turns to the virtual reality world of Extreme Experience, ExEx, now commercially available since she trained on it in the US. The best and worst of human experience can be found in ExEx, and in the extremes of violence Teresa finds that past and present combine ...

About this title

Review

A bizarre and horrible coincidence draws FBI special agent Teresa Simons to England: on the same day that a mass murderer killed her husband and fourteen others in Kingwood City, Texas, another spree killer massacred seventeen in the small Sussex town of Bulverton. Teresa seeks to understand her husband's death by exploring the similar but unrelated event in Bulverton, as she once explored reconstructions of historical mass murders in ExEx (Extreme Experience, a brutally realistic form of virtual reality) to train for her FBI job. In Bulverton she finds a commercial ExEx parlor, which, she is horrified and fascinated to discover, offers a Bulverton mass-murder scenario. As Teresa explores both the town and the scenario of Bulverton, the separations between reality and ExEx, between ExEx murder reconstructions, between past and present, begin to blur--and so does the separation between Kingwood City and Bulverton, as Teresa realizes the simultaneity of the events may be more than a coincidence.

A New York Times Recommended Book, The Extremes received the British Science Fiction Association award for 1999. Christopher Priest's previous novel, The Prestige, won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. --Cynthia Ward

From the Publisher

"An enthralling novel, which raises important issues about the pornography of violence and its packaging as entertainment. A thought-provoking, terrifying and persuasive prophecy." --Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph

"The Extremes is a novel of violence and reality, of extraordinary power and ambiguity. A vital contribution from a key British writer." --Stephen Baxter, SFX

"Once again we reach the end of a Priest novel caught up in a prestidigitation. In the end, The Extremes is perhaps a nightmare, perhaps not. Most extraordinarily, for most of its length it is both. Teresa is both a meat-puppet victim of the new world, and one of those who writes our futures for us. Swift, haunting, cruel and kind, The Extremes is a guidance manual for the maze we face." --John Clute, The Independent

"Undoubtedly his best yet...a tour de force." --Brian Stableford, Interzone

"Mesmerizing." --Brian Case, Time Out [UK]

Edition details

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0575075783
• ISBN 13: 9780575075788
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320