Raised in common in crèches, 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. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. The only alternative to progress is death. 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. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. There’s an insightful review on Calmgrove that didn’t miss the point, and Chris also makes some interesting points in the comments.Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The "devilishly entertaining" masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world-from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige ( Time Out New York ) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes.
That’s because in 2014 I judged that ending basically only on its Hard SF merits, but I think I entirely missed the point by doing so. There’s a good chance I’d appreciate it a whole lot more, as I liked reading it, but felt cheated because of the ending.
Having read more ‘vintage’ SF now, I think I would review The Inverted World totally differently.
UPDATE 5/2018 – I read this at the beginning of my exploration of science fiction. Hard science fiction purists should avoid this, since the science part of this book is ludicrous.
It could have been pretty clever with better editing, but now it only merits an “Okay, you guys sure were afraid of Nuclear Holocaust back in the seventies.” Moreover, the explanation for an important consequence of this twist (and hence the plot as a whole) is totally unbelievable, and that ruins the book, all things considered. This doesn’t really happen, since it is all quite predictable. However, the back cover promises a very surprising twist at the end. The Inverted World is a rather fun, quick read.
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