Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN: 1590172698

Author: Priest, Christopher

Condition: New

Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 NovelsWinner of the British Science Fiction AwardNominated for the Hugo AwardThe devilishly entertaining masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world-from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York)The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the citys engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the optimum into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.Helward Mann is a member of the citys elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the citys continued existence. But the world-he is about to discover-is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.