THE SPACE MACHINE
This was a weird little book. It's an effort by Priest to fuse together H.G. Wells' two most famous novels, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, into a single shared universe. The story begins with the narrator, Edward Turnbull, meeting Amelia Fitzgibbon, the assistant to an inventor named William Reynolds. While the two of them are tinkering around with his time machine (which also transports people through space), they find themselves stranded on Mars, prior to the Martian invasion of Earth.

This Mars is depicted as Wells imagined it, with red plant life and a weak atmosphere, but with Priest's own invention of a population of human slaves. The most interesting part of the novel is probably this middle section, where Edward and Amelia struggle to survive in the bleak cities of Mars over a period of many months.

Later, they manage to return to Earth by stowing away on the first Martian invasion projectile, fired from a long cannon supported by the slopes of Olympus Mons. Here the novel fuses more directly with the original work, as Edward and Amelia survive in southern England in the midst of the Martian invasion. They even meet the narrator of The War of the Worlds, identified as Mr. Wells.

Then it got a little stupid. Priest decided to tie the The Time Machine back into the story, and the trio return to Reynold's laboratory to construct a new machine out of a bedstead. Then they fly around the countryside encased in the machine's "attenuation field," making them invisible and invincible, dropping grenades on the Martians' tripods. This is a bizarre and wacky image in a novel that was, despite everything, remaining relatively consistent and suspending my disbelief. It's all pointless anyway, since the Martians are defeated the same way they are in the original novel, which I won't spoil in case you're one of the seven or eight people who haven't heard about it.

I haven't read The Time Machine (though I have seen the shitty movie) and I've only read an abridged version of The War of the Worlds, plus an excellent webcomic version that no longer seems to be online, so I can't really compare The Space Machine to its forebears. Suffice to say that while it was somewhat entertaining, as science fiction goes, I'm not sure what the point was. The stories are similar in only the most basic of ways, and to merge them together seems like a brief thought experiment that Priest forced into a novel that never should have been.

A DREAM OF WESSEX
More original than The Space Machine, A Dream Of Wessex is a serious science fiction/romance novel about virtual reality and the subconscious.

It's quite confusing for the first third or so, but it eventually becomes clear what is taking place: a group of scientists in the 1980s (the near future at the time of publication) have developed a machine that can project a shared virtual reality. They choose to "project" the future of England in the early 22nd century, a utopia, with the hope of discovering how that utopia was accomplished. Why a virtual reality projection of the future would be even remotely accurate, I was never really clear on.

In any case, the projection is of south-west England, which has become an island after a series of earthquakes. It's a peaceful, beautiful place, compared to the dystopic 1980s, in which terrorism is becoming more rampant in England and there are all manner of social and economic problems. It's also here, however, that the book shows its age: England has become a socialist state absorbed into the Soviet bloc. (Also, North America has been taken over by Muslims. Maybe Christopher Priest is racist after all, as I suspected after Fugue For A Darkening Island?)

The story largely revolves around the scientists in the projection who have become more devoted to it than they have to their real lives, and of how they must prevent the new project manager (who also happens to be the narrator's possessive ex-boyfriend) from shutting it down or corrupting it. On the whole it was a fairly decent sci-fi story, but nothing amazingly gripping original; a completely different league from Priest's science fiction masterpiece Inverted World. ( )