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A big pat on the back for Gollancz for re-releasing Christopher Priest's The Extremes. Priest's work does not stick around for long on the shelves and it can be hard to get back numbers, so I am glad that I have finally got the chance to read it.
The Extremes is a novel about virtual reality. A lot of novels with VR as a central part of the story were written in the 80s and 90s and most of them were not very satisfactory. The majority fell into one of two camps. Either they were using VR as a rather pointless way of creating a fantasy world for the story or the books tried to blur the boundaries of the virtual and the real world. This latter approach is the more interesting but was somehow never really convincing as the boundaries between the virtual and the real are pretty hard and sharp and so there was always a lot of hand waving technobabble invented to make it happen. Priest does aim for this second blurring approach but he has the common sense to ignore the mechanism and just concentrate on the result - basically he just snaps his fingers and says "blurring happens".
The story is really about experience and the main character coping with grief from loss. The VR is just a vehicle for illustrating this. It also makes some pretty graphic points about gun violence along the way. It is an interesting, even gripping book if read at the surface level. But being Christopher Priest, there are more levels to explore. Sometimes I found myself just stopping and trying to figure out which levels are being addressed at any one time. Often one little incident presents the key to a whole range of things and if you don't concentrate you miss it. Even then I'm sure I missed a whole lot. This is normal for Priest's work although in this case I think perhaps even better than usual. I think this may become my favourite priest novel.
One little annoyance - this edition came with an afterword by John Clute where he proclaims that Priest is dangerous to reviewers, editors etc because he does not fit neatly into a genre. He makes the quite often heard statement that such people are trying to fit all writing into neat categories and can't accept the cross-genre nature of a writer like Priest. I think this is an insult to reviewers and editors and is the type of "I'm more clever than you" statement designed to inflate the ego of the person rather than reflect reality. My experience is that reviewers and editors generally are well aware of the continuous nature of the writing style universe - in fact most seem to treat such a picture as self evident. The genre labels are associated with volume concentrations but there is an awareness of the spaces between them and that work can fit into those spaces. The labels can be used to define the spaces. To say the The Extremes is an "SF, lit, surreal, crime thriller" novel is not an attempt to fit the book into these categories but an attempt to use common reference points to give an indication of where the book places in the complex continuum that is the writing style space. Publishers and booksellers too are accused of not understanding the nature of books in the spaces between genres. I think the reason that they have trouble with them (as they obviously do) is the more prosaic difficulties of logistics and marketing that such books present.
The Extremes is a novel about virtual reality. A lot of novels with VR as a central part of the story were written in the 80s and 90s and most of them were not very satisfactory. The majority fell into one of two camps. Either they were using VR as a rather pointless way of creating a fantasy world for the story or the books tried to blur the boundaries of the virtual and the real world. This latter approach is the more interesting but was somehow never really convincing as the boundaries between the virtual and the real are pretty hard and sharp and so there was always a lot of hand waving technobabble invented to make it happen. Priest does aim for this second blurring approach but he has the common sense to ignore the mechanism and just concentrate on the result - basically he just snaps his fingers and says "blurring happens".
The story is really about experience and the main character coping with grief from loss. The VR is just a vehicle for illustrating this. It also makes some pretty graphic points about gun violence along the way. It is an interesting, even gripping book if read at the surface level. But being Christopher Priest, there are more levels to explore. Sometimes I found myself just stopping and trying to figure out which levels are being addressed at any one time. Often one little incident presents the key to a whole range of things and if you don't concentrate you miss it. Even then I'm sure I missed a whole lot. This is normal for Priest's work although in this case I think perhaps even better than usual. I think this may become my favourite priest novel.
One little annoyance - this edition came with an afterword by John Clute where he proclaims that Priest is dangerous to reviewers, editors etc because he does not fit neatly into a genre. He makes the quite often heard statement that such people are trying to fit all writing into neat categories and can't accept the cross-genre nature of a writer like Priest. I think this is an insult to reviewers and editors and is the type of "I'm more clever than you" statement designed to inflate the ego of the person rather than reflect reality. My experience is that reviewers and editors generally are well aware of the continuous nature of the writing style universe - in fact most seem to treat such a picture as self evident. The genre labels are associated with volume concentrations but there is an awareness of the spaces between them and that work can fit into those spaces. The labels can be used to define the spaces. To say the The Extremes is an "SF, lit, surreal, crime thriller" novel is not an attempt to fit the book into these categories but an attempt to use common reference points to give an indication of where the book places in the complex continuum that is the writing style space. Publishers and booksellers too are accused of not understanding the nature of books in the spaces between genres. I think the reason that they have trouble with them (as they obviously do) is the more prosaic difficulties of logistics and marketing that such books present.