Perhaps the best words to describe Christopher Priest's work are those he himself used in his essay "British Science Fiction" (1979) to describe the genre as a whole: "literate and fresh, displaying qualities of landscape, irony, language and subtlety that any other nation, English-speaking or otherwise, would find hard to match." Since his first novel, Indoctrinaire (1970), his focus has been on the interface between the "real" world and the one that the mind creates. For a fiction writer, the relationship between these worlds is particularly problematical, and Priest uses a variety of narrative styles and points of view in exploring it. Many of his characters are themselves writers, and the infinite-regress effect of having characters create fictions within fictions affords Priest a range of opportunities to call into question the nature of reality. Once linked with New Wave writers--according to Nicholas Ruddick, Priest coined the phrase--Priest declared his independence...