The inverted world
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world--he is about to discover--is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
13mentions
12people
2015–2026years
69% recommend31% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Another recommendation, not a first contact story, but a very weird world and you wonder why things are how they are:
Inverted World by Christopher Priest
- The space-time geometry of our world is not Euclidian, not even Riemannian. The story of "Operation Chaos" looks more chaotic than scientific. That fits with the books of Poul Anderson I've read, like the excellent High Crusade: he likes going wild and doesn't care much for the scientific pretense.
For another take on non-Euclidian geometries, I have good memories of Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
- Greg Egan's diaspora is in this list of 12 books. They chose the novel Diaspora, but many of his short stories and novels are very mathematical. I remember stories about a toric universe, or playing football on a relativistic field (with a pseudo-Riemannian geometry)…
A big miss in this list is Christopher Priest's "Inverted world", about living in a non-Euclidean world.
I've other SF books with a of focus on math, from the "The stochastic man" to "Ninefox gambit", but they were either not enjoyable or with ridiculous mathematical contents.
- “The Inverted World” by Christopher Priest involves a world that appears to be based on hyperbolic geometry I believe.
- Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
An oldie, but a weirdie.
- To add to the vein of sci-fi novels using this idea: Inverted World by Christopher Priest. Well, similar concept but weirdified in the 1970’s fashion.
