Christopher Priest is a British novelist of speculative fiction. Author of over a dozen novels, including the multiple award-winning The Prestige (1995), he was one of the key figures in the New Wave movement that revitalized science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s.

"I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. To choose too carefully is to become pedantic, closing the imagination to wider visions, yet to err the other way is to invite anarchy into one's mind."

– Christopher Priest, The Affirmation (1981)