Probably the best received of Priest's pure SF work was Inverted World, a novel set on a bizarre planet that can be best described as an inside-out sphere, its equator & poles stretching out to infinity. The protagonist Helward Mann literally sees this for himself in a narrative spike in the middle of the book, after which the plot tails-off to a typically inconclusive conclusion. The novel's structure thereby mirrors the shape of the planet. This fine attention to structure is one of his hallmarks & can be seen in all his later novels.
Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He has published eleven novels, three short-story collections, and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations, and children’s nonfiction. In 1996 Priest won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige, which was adapted into a film by Christopher Nolan in 2006. His most recent novel, The Separation, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Priest and his wife, the writer Leigh Kennedy, live in Hastings, England, with their twin children.
John Clute was born in Toronto, Ontario in 1940, but has lived most of his life in England. He has won three Hugo Awards for his nonfiction. Recent work includes Appleseed, a novel, The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, and Canary Fever: Reviews.