The death of our Vice-President Christopher Priest on 2nd February at the age of eighty has come as a deep shock both to Wellsians and to anyone with an interest in British fantastic literature. Since 1970 Priest had published eighteen novels, together with volumes of short stories, and he grew more productive as he got older. No fewer than six of the eighteen came out during the years 2013-23, the fruit of a prodigious final decade for a writer who is still greatly under-appreciated.
In a biographical note to the 2005 Penguin Classics edition of The Invisible Man (for which he wrote the Introduction), Chris described himself as ‘a committed Wellsian, with many references to H. G. Wells, his thought and his books woven unobtrusively into his fiction’. To members of our Society he is probably best known for The Space Machine (1976), his space-opera rewriting of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – but this comparatively clunky early work conveys all too little sense of the distinction and originality of Priest at his best. For some humour and subtlety, we must wait for the final chapters where we encounter H. G. Wells himself with ‘something of a gleam in his eye’; and the book is also dedicated to Wells. But to get the authentic flavour of Christopher Priest, readers might turn to The Adjacent (2013) where Wells makes another, more discreet appearance, this time as a temporary army captain on a secret First World War mission to France to supervise the testing of his ‘telpherage’ system for military communication. This is just one incident in an eerie story of time slippages partly set in an alarming near-future world, the Islamic Republic of Great Britain.
Chris was a loyal supporter of our Society. His last appearance at one of our events was at Bromley Central Library in September 2016, where – flanked by a large bust of H. G. Wells from his personal collection – he gave the keynote address at our 150th anniversary celebration of Wells’s birth. Many of us enjoyed his congenial and erudite company, both in the talk itself and on our subsequent tour of Bromley High Street and its surroundings. Much more recently, he generously contributed a revised version of his Invisible Man essay to the Winter 2022 (Issue 44) edition of our Newsletter. By this time he had moved from the south of England to the Isle of Bute in Scotland with the writer Nina Allan, who in 2023 became his fourth wife. Nina looked after him during his final illness, and she records that one of his last public acts, three months before his death, was to read aloud the opening pages of The War of the Worlds for a French film documentary.
Patrick Parrinder