Works
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 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.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Priest (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I cannot spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the line, All between that works or grows,
Every thing is kin of mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)