Christopher Priest

My favorite being Department of Truth still.

But I decided to do a little bit of a swerve and recommend Christopher Priest's run on Vampironica.

Vampirella.

I've got the Archie brand.

Christopher Priest's run on Vampirella, which he has been writing.

I feel like a lot of people don't know this, you know, like that Christopher Priest, this legendary writer, has been writing Vampirella for the past seven years.

It is a very long run.

And honestly, though, I wouldn't fault people because, you know, Dynamite is like not the best at, you know, like...

A literal magic trick.

Which perfectly sets up the film sitting at number two on the list, Christopher Nolan's 2006 film, The Prestige, based on Christopher Priest's 1995 novel.

Now, the background on this adaptation is fascinating because Priest specifically wanted Nolan to direct it.

Long before Nolan was the undisputed king of blockbusters, right?

It is controversial in science fiction whether any science fiction should be literary.

You know, someone like Christopher Priest years ago, like in the late 70s, I think, was talking about putting language first in science fiction.

This is what he thought everyone should be doing too.

And of course, Priest was also associated with the kind of New World's crowd.

And this brings us to an entirely different mechanical approach to adaptation, which is structural engineering

Okay, the source material here is Christopher Priest's nineteen ninety-five novel of the same name, and it's vital to note the pedigree of this book

Right.

We aren't talking about a Cheap, throwaway pulp paperback

It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

It had serious literary weight

But despite all those awards, it was only a modest financial success at the time, mostly because Christopher Priest, while brilliant, was a relatively niche science fiction author

And there's this great piece of trivia from the article about its origins

So I looked into it, and Ice was Cavan's final novel before her death one year later, and it was also her first successful novel.

And it was published in 1967, with a later foreword by Christopher Priest in 2006, which is automatically a free pass from me.

And then the copy I've been reading is the Pushkin Press edition from 2025, which has this quote from Jeff Vandermeer, quote, a strange and compelling classic of dystopian and climate fiction, one that, with foreboding and deep compassion, maps the psyche and the terrain of dislocation, end quote.

Sir Christopher Priest's foreword calls Ice a work of slipstream fiction, which is, in the simplest terms, speculative fiction crossed with literature.

And the term was invented by Richard Dorsett in conversation with Bruce Sterling when they were discussing non-genre SF and fantasy.

This is Bruce Sterling's quote, which you can find from Wikipedia.

I really like Cavan's writing here.

Her suspension of reality, but also the physicality of the scenes.