I can see why Priest himself thinks of it as central to his œuvre. The book is about a binary existence, a writer based in England writing about his own life in a fictional archipelago where he can gain eternal life at the cost of his own memory; while his doppelgänger in the archipelago is writing about his life A strange place called England. Families, lovers, writing all intersect across the two strands of reality and we cannot be certain which, if either, is the more real. A number of his earlier books are about a clash between realities, but we readers are usually left less uncertain than we are here about which is "real". And a lot of his later books pick up themes from The Affirmation and take them further, or in a different direction. Certainly I feel that now I have read it, I appreciate better what Priest was doing in The Islanders and The Adjacent. It's a bit surprising that the only award it picked up was the Australian Ditmar (though I suppose there were just fewer aware in 1981; it lost the BSFA award to The Shadow of the Torturer). But the 2011 Gollancz SF Masterworks edition features a helpful introduction by Graham Sleight.
The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest
I can see why Priest himself thinks of it as central to his œuvre. The book is about a binary existence, a writer based in England writing about his own life in a fictional archipelago where he can gain eternal life at the cost of his own memory; while his doppelgänger in the archipelago is writing about his life A strange place called England. Families, lovers, writing all intersect across the two strands of reality and we cannot be certain which, if either, is the more real. A number of his earlier books are about a clash between realities, but we readers are usually left less uncertain than we are here about which is "real". And a lot of his later books pick up themes from The Affirmation and take them further, or in a different direction. Certainly I feel that now I have read it, I appreciate better what Priest was doing in The Islanders and The Adjacent. It's a bit surprising that the only award it picked up was the Australian Ditmar (though I suppose there were just fewer aware in 1981; it lost the BSFA award to The Shadow of the Torturer). But the 2011 Gollancz SF Masterworks edition features a helpful introduction by Graham Sleight.
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