The Space Machine

"I thought that leads neatly to Christopher Priest, The Space Machine . I was trying to think of science fiction novels that had inspired me, and it was tricky to pick any one because I read sci-fi very intensely for about two or three years in my early teens and it was almost all short stories. It wasn’t like there was one book that obsessed me. It was just I liked the genre and I liked the ideas it threw at you. A lot of the stories were quite bad, but it didn’t matter because a) a bad book can still have a good idea in it; and b) I have enormous affection and admiration for all the terrible writers I read growing up, because they inspired me – I sort of thought, “Well, I may not be very good, but I’m not as bad as he is.” There were some good writers too – one of the most out-standing being Christopher Priest. I think he was one of the English new wave of the 1970’s science fiction writers. I didn’t really get his books at first. To be honest, I didn’t really understand them. I could see they were beautifully written and kind of fascinating but I didn’t really know what was going on. Then I discovered The Space Machine. The Space Machine is an HG Wells pastiche. Priest sat down in 1976 and wrote a scientific romance of the sort that HG Wells would have written in about 1896. He smashes together the plots of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and he does it very wittily, and very effectively. His young hero and heroine encounter the inventor of the time machine, they take a trip on it, and they discover that as well as moving them in time, it moves them in space. They arrive on Mars where the Martians are preparing to launch their invasion towards Earth. They return to England by stowing away on one of the Martian cylinders and landing at the beginning of The War of the Worlds . It’s a while since I read it but it does end up with them flying around on a bedstead dropping bombs down the turrets of Martian war machines. It’s tremendous fun. It’s hugely page turning. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It made me realise, as a teenager, that science fiction didn’t have to be about the future. All these previous things, all the glories of the scientific romance were still open to me. I could sit down and write one of those and quite often did as a young man. I guess eventually that evolved into Mortal Engines . It is set in the future, in a rather retro society – in that it has Victorian and Dickensian influences. It was The Space Machine that set me going down that road and I’m assuming it’s still in print. Of all the sci-fi books I remember reading I think that’s most fun. I think I read it in one sitting. Christopher Priest is very good with the Victorian period and sensibility. The Prestige is my favourite of his other books. It’s about two rival Victorian stage illusionists, and they’re trying to outdo each other in a trick where they disappear in one part of a theatre and reappear in another. One of them has a secret identical twin, so he speeds ahead, but the other one, in frustration, heads off to America and goes to visit Tesla, the great inventor and gets him to invent a matter transporter which will literally transport him from one bit of the theatre to another – but there’s a terrible catch. Though this science fiction element creeps into it, it feels like a pitch perfect recreation of the time."