Christopher Priest (1943-2024)
News item dated 4 February 2024
We are deeply sad to report that Christopher Priest died on 2 February 2024 aged 80. He had been diagnosed with untreatable cancer in August 2023 but made no public statement, informing only his family and selected friends. Although his fiction often inhabited a "slipstream" zone not precisely aligned with the sf genre as usually understood, his importance to that genre is reflected by many sf awards. These include the BSFA Award for Inverted World (1974), Ditmar Awards for The Space Machine (1976) and The Affirmation (1981), the World Fantasy Award for The Prestige (1995) – which also received the non-genre James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was notably filmed as The Prestige (2006) – and further BSFA Awards for The Extremes (1998), The Separation (2002) – which also won the Arthur C Clarke Award – and The Islanders (2011), which also shared a John W Campbell Memorial Award. His final novel Airside appeared in 2023.
John Clute writes: "Between us, the principal editors of this encyclopedia knew Chris Priest for more than a century. Too short. He was a author whose works honoured and challenged the genre he began in; he was an exemplary figure and a living monument and a gadfly to the world as a whole. At the end of 2023 he was close to finishing a nonfiction book on J G Ballard, with 70,000 words written (Nina Allan has arranged to complete the text). It cannot be too often said that he had a deep gift for friendship. I can hear his voice now, which will remain a companion on the rest of this road."