Thursday 22 March 2018

Bloody NEL:
Real-Time World
by Christopher Priest
(1976)


You know that feeling, particularly common to SF paperbacks, when you begin reading a back cover blurb and think, “gosh, this sounds like one hell of a story”, only to reach the third or fourth paragraph and realise that you’re actually reading synopses of multiple short stories, rather than a single novel? No..? Well either way, you’ve got a perfect example right here.

Christopher Priest of course needs no introduction as one of the finest writers to emerge from the New Wave of British Science Fiction, so it only remains to be said that I quite like the understated cover art here.

It looks a bit like a background knocked up by the artist for a sword n’ sorcery commission, before he added the barbarians and chain mail bikini-clad maidens and so on.

Breaking our Ray Feibush streak, the SF Encyclopaedia credits this one to Chris Achilleos.


2 comments:

Bollops said...

I had EXACTLY that feeling while reading the blurb! One day AI will exist which can smerge short story collections into the single, insane but somehow coherent novels of our dreams. But yeah, must get hold of this one.

RayRay said...

Yeah, same here. Sadly, I'm just not as interested now.