Hello Folks,
It’s time once again at the Science Fiction club for a group read.
For December’s meeting, we’ve selected Inverted world by Christopher Priest.
There are copies on both BARD”
https://nlsbard.loc.gov/nlsbardprod/download/detail/srch/DB69875
and two Publisher Quality versions on Bookshare:
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/1020411
and
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/4162792
The NLS annotation reads as follows:
The walled metropolis sits upon tracks, pulled along by a giant winch
toward the ever-moving “optimum.” After becoming an apprentice in the
secretive guild that keeps the city in motion, Helward Mann encounters
an outside world that proves stranger than he ever imagined. Includes
2008 afterword by John Clute.
and the Bookshare synopsis of one of the PQ versions reads:
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 city’s 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 crèches, 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 city’s
elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued
existence. But the world–he is about to discover–is infinitely
stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
