Cover for Inverted World by Christopher Priest

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.

The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping...

The set up is just so incredibly tantalizing. A moving city. A twisted reality. A gradual reveal as our protagonist, who was raised in ignorance, slowly learns the truth of his world. It really is gripping stuff and pulled me right in, which was a welcome change from my recent grinding re-read of The Sprawl series1.

What follows is, I hope, a relatively spoiler free review of the book. However, if you really want no hints–and given the book is a bit of a mystery box, with the joy in opening it and revealing its contents–it might be best to read the book before proceeding further!

Though I will say: I don’t understand why the ending is praised. Be ready for a fairly dull, exposition-laden finish and a very sudden ending that at first made me wonder if there was something wrong with my copy of the book.

Reading this book, I found myself thinking about the modern climate crisis. Here we’re presented with a society facing a relentless threat from reality itself. Knowing what they know, they do the only thing they can think of: keep moving in the hopes of staving off the inevitable. But the system these people are raised in prevents them from considering that, not only might there be other solutions to their problem, but that they don’t actually understand the problem itself. Our protagonist Helward, and those like him in the City, are like those members of a seaside community who, facing more and more frequent floods and intense storms due to rising seas and a warming globe, refuse to accept the reality of climate change and instead keep stacking up sandbags.

Given that framing, the book is both optimistic and pessimistic, in that ultimately change is possible for the people of the city, but some remain unable to open their minds to even just the possibility of change.

As far as the style and aesthetic of the book, it’s pretty amazing to see Priest, in the 1970s, foreshadow “The Hunger Games” or “The Maze Runner” some 30-40 years later. With a similar grimy, gritty retro futuristic style, the book gives off faint steam punk vibes in an intriguing, not-quite-post-apocalyptic setting. It’s easily one of the more imaginative world building efforts I’ve experienced.

As for the narrative itself, while it does have the fault of being fairly heavy on exposition at times, the story moves along briskly with steady dribbles of reveals along the way that kept me hooked.

But then there’s that ending.

A review quoted in the Wikipedia article for the book noted:

The unwinding of this SF mystery is highly satisfactory, but the clever resolution is slightly deus ex futuristic machina.

And frankly, that understates things. Profoundly. To put it simply: the ending is simply terrible. Structurally, the ending is just pure exposition, that is literally character dialogue explaining what’s going on. We get a brief reaction from our protagonist and then… that’s it.

Worse, the ending doesn’t actually explain what’s going on. I’m actually not convinced, given the book is full of unreliable narrators, that the explanation we’re given is actually the real answer, given the holes in their story.

Now, do I regret reading the book? Absolutely not! I gave it four stars, after all! The journey was absolutely a delight that kept me pulled in the whole way. But, like reading a novel by King2 or Stephenson3, sometimes you just have to accept that it’s the journey that matters and not the destination.

  1. Aside from Neuromancer I don’t know why I keep trying to read Gibson. Some part of me just can’t let go of the idea that, as influential as he is, and as much beloved as he might be among some, maybe he’s just not for me… ↩

  2. Ever read “Under the Dome”? You know what I’m talking about. ↩

  3. Oh Cryptonomicon… ↩