One of his early novels,
The Affirmation, concerns a traumatized man who apparently flips into a delusional world in which he experiences a lengthy voyage to an archipelago of exotic islands. This setting had previously featured in many of Priest's short stories, which raises the question of whether the Dream Archipelago is actually a fantasy. The state of mind depicted in this novel is remarkably similar to that of the delusional fantasy-prone psychoanalytic patient ("Kirk Allen") in Robert Lindner's
The Fifty-Minute Hour or Jack London's tortured prisoner in
The Star Rover.
Priest also dealt with delusional alternate realities in
A Dream of Wessex in which a group of experimenters for a British government project are brain-wired to a hypnosis machine and jointly participate in an imaginary but as-real-as-real future in a vacation island off the coast of a Sovietized Britain.
Probably the best received of his pure SF work was
Inverted World, a novel set on a bizarre planet that can be best described as an inside-out sphere, its equator and poles stretching out to infinity. The protagonist Helward Mann literally sees this for himself in a narrative spike in the middle of the book, after which the plot tails-off to a typically inconclusive conclusion. The novel's structure thereby mirrors the shape of the planet. This fine attention to structure is another of Priest's hallmarks, and can be seen in all his later novels but particularly
The Prestige and
The Separation.
Tie-in work
He wrote the tie-in novel to accompany the 1999 David Cronenberg movie
eXistenZ, the theme of which has much in common with some of Priest's own novels, most notably
A Dream of Wessex and
The Extremes.
He was approached to write stories for the 18th and 19th seasons of
Doctor Who. The first, "Sealed Orders," was a political thriller based on Gallifrey; it was eventually abandoned due to script problems and replaced with "Warriors' Gate." The second, "The Enemy Within," was eventually abandoned due to script problems and what Priest perceived as insulting treatment after he was asked to modify the script to include the death of Adric. It was replaced by "Earthshock." This falling out soured the production office on the use of established literary authors with no more being commissioned as a result.
A film of his novel
The Prestige was released on October 20, 2006. It was directed by Christopher Nolan and starred Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Despite differences between the novel and screenplay, Nolan was reportedly so concerned the denouement be kept a surprise that he blocked plans for a lucrative US tie-in edition of the book.
Work under pseudonyms
- Priest uses the pseudonyms John Luther Novak and Colin Wedgelock, usually for his movie novelizations. As well as the eXistenZ novelization (which undermined the pseudonym by including Priest's biography on the pre-title page), he has also novelised the movies Mona Lisa (as John Luther Novak) and Short Circuit (as Colin Wedgelock).
- Priest has co-operated with fellow British science fiction author David Langford on various enterprises under the Ansible brand.
- Comic book writer Jim Owsley changed his name to "Christopher Priest" in the mid-1990s. He has stated that he was completely unaware at the time that there was an established author of the same name.