Inverted World
Ratings18
Average rating3.8
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 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. 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.
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This was a nice interlude between books 5 and 6 of the Dark Tower. I came to it through the Verge bookclub after discovering their discussion of Foucault's Pendulum in a podcast.
I enjoyed the concepts of this novel, but I found the end quite dissatisfying because it didn't tie up the main loose end of the disparate ageing. I can't go into more without spoiling it. The characters were rather thin, but in a sense this added to the idea that the City was the main character and it kept the book short, which appealed to me after the long Dark Tower books. It reminded me a little of another book that I read in book-club mode, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman: thin characters and time distortion. Looking back at my review of that, I gave it two stars. So this fared a little better.
This was probably a good book by 70s standards; it's still not a bad scifi and I did read it to the end (and the Grand Idea is captivating, though it had been redone several times since then); but for the modern reader, 50 years later, it also feels terribly slow, too straightforward and too dragged on - it was honestly a slug and I kept at it only for the explanation, which came too abruptly and too “told not shown”
