Inverted World

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new reissue of Christopher Priest's Inverted World, out July

Product Description
The city is winched along a track through a devastated land full of
hostile tribes. Tracks 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," slipping into the crushing gravitational field that has
transformed life on earth. The only alternative to the city's forward
progress is death.

The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its
inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches,
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,
for all that, 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 the risks the city runs, how tenuous is its continued existence,
how essential it is that discipline be maintained. And yet, as he is
about to discover, the world is even stranger than he dreamed.

Christopher Priest's The Inverted World is a meticulously imagined,
deeply disconcerting vision of an alternate reality that lights up not
only the dreams that sustain what passes for reality but the alien
essence of the human.

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