My hosts now were two graduate students, one male, one female, from the Revisionist History Department. In the noise I could not hear their names clearly. I liked them both and was attracted by their easy conversational style and, as an unsought-for bonus, by their apparent familiarity with several of the books I had written. Without going into my reasons in detail, I asked them both not to address me as Doctor, saying I preferred the use of my given name. They were fine with that. The ice was being broken in many different respects.Christopher Priest's latest book returns us to the Dream Archipelago, with the story of Todd Fremde (which is almost German for "strange death"), a mystery writer who gets sucked into a real mystery in the course of giving a lecture at a far-off university, in a world which is very like ours, except that a phenomenon called "mutability" blurs reality often and confusingly. Twins and magic pop up again, as they have done in a lot of Priest's other work (notably The Prestige). I see some reviewers complaining that the situation, and the mystery, are not adequately explained at the end, but I felt very much that the journey is its own reward (we are practically told as much in the text). Recommended, though I think I would not tell anyone to start reading Priest with The Evidence. You can get it here.
