Christopher Priest passed away on 2^nd February 2024. He was without competition my favourite living author and it saddens me greatly that I will no longer be able to await his new novel with excited expectation. However, since I’m a little behind with my reading, I can still enjoy his last two novels Expect Me Tomorrow and Airside as new. This review of Expect Me Tomorrow is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Christopher Priest (1943-2024).

Warning: Contains Minor Spoilers

It’s clear from many of his books that Christopher Priest was a man who was angry with many things about the world. The target of his ire in Expect Me Tomorrow is climate change, although in much the same way that An American Story was not specifically a book about 9/11, Expect Me Tomorrow is not specifically a book about climate change. However, climate change is very much at the heart of the story and the parts of the book set in 2050 (only 26 years away at time of writing) are a grim portent of where our planet could end up if we don’t take these things more seriously. As with all of Priest’s unsettling future scenarios, it’s presented in a rather matter-of-face manner; none of the screaming hysteria of climate change movies like The Day After Tomorrow, just everyday folks struggling to get on with their lives in a world of dust storms, unexpected insect infestations and inescapable extremes of heat.

That’s not what the book is all about though. Oh, nothing so simple for a book by our Christopher! The decline of the earth’s biosphere is mainly a backdrop to another stranger story, which is routed partly in fact. In the annals of English legal history, the case of Adolf Beck is one of the greatest miscarriages of justice of the 19^th century, leading to changes in the law that exist to this day. The Norwegian–born shipping clerk was in the wrong place at the wrong time to be fingered by a defrauded woman for a crime committed by a completely different man to whom he bore a passing resemblance. He was arrested and put before other victims of the fraudster, who all identified him as the guilty party on nothing more than his physical similarity and the fact that he had a ‘foreign’ accent. Actual evidence that Beck was in South America at the time of at least one of the crimes was swept aside and he was imprisoned twice for crimes he didn’t commit.

Expect Me Tomorrow deals with some of Christopher Priest’s favourite conceits: travel, unfamiliar technology and twins. There are two sets of twins in the novel; Alder and Adolf Beck in the 1890s and their distance descendants Chad and Greg Ramsey in the 2050s. Both Alder Beck and Chad Ramsey are climatologists, but their studies approach the subject from very different angles. The fear in the 19^th century was that the earth was approaching another ice age, with pollution from coal-fired factories producing an effect similar to the detritus from the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, which caused harsh winters across the world from a number of years. By the 21^st century, the thinking had changed, with the understanding of greenhouse gases leading to the massive super-heating of the earth (which is visibly occurring now).

Impressively, Expect Me Tomorrow implies that both theories may be correct and it adopts a Gaian approach to the earth itself seeking to address the problem, heralded by the arrival of mysterious white flowers in certain parts of the world (echoing the black flowers in the 1985 TV geo-political thriller Edge of Darkness). I’d long known that if the Gulf Stream packs in, we could be looking at winters in the UK equivalent to Moscow and Northern Canada, but Priest’s well-researched novel explains how reserves of fresh glacial meltwater suddenly flooding into the saltwater ocean could destroy a lot of our established weather systems and turn the earth’s weather upside down! It’s a lot more complicated than simply global warming turning the world as we know it into a hothouse… but no less catastrophic.

But wait, I hear you cry; I thought this novel wasn’t about climate change? Well, it kind of isn’t, but this is the background against which it was set. You see, in 2050 Chad Ramsey is doing some work as a police profiler when he is invited to test a new form of sub-dermal internet, with the signal being transmitted directly into his brain. This is very much the kind of mysterious, threatening, life-altering technology that occurs frequently in Priest’s work. When Chad stops working for the police, he retains the implants and is able to use it to investigate a family secret that has always fascinated him – that of black sheep of the family Adolf Beck, imprisoned a century and a half ago for reasons lost in antiquity. Bizarrely, he is able to use DNA codes to create an unreliable telepathic connection with his ancestor through the new technology.

Such is the unreliability of the technology though that Chad doesn’t realise Adolf was a twin and he’s sometimes contacting Adolf, sometimes Alder and sometimes both. He also doesn’t realise that the connection is disorientating and frightening for Adolf and Alder, who have problems of their own to deal with. What follows is a jigsaw puzzle of clues trickling through as Chad and Greg try to figure out the mystery of their ancestor and Adolf and Alder struggle to deal with their individual problems in a distinctly analogue world. Priest cleverly contrasts the two worlds – the 21^st century where Chad can have any information he wishes transmitted directly into his brain and the 19^th century, where Alder has to wait for letters to even know what is happening with his twin, not even realising when he has been wrongly convicted and eventually imprisoned for a series of crimes in which he played no part whatsoever.

Expect Me Tomorrow is a clever and challenging book, much as we’ve come to expect from Christopher Priest. As with his previous book The Evidence, it presents a definite conclusion and is less oblique than some of his earlier work. Personally, I like both; I’m just as happy with a novel that ends with a question as I am with one that ends with an answer. This book is not part of Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago sequence and as such is a lot more accessible to anyone who isn’t a keen follower of his work. You could pick up Expect Me Tomorrow having never even heard of Christopher Priest and still enjoy it. Although it’s explicitly sci-fi from the futuristic technology on display, it is –like a lot of Priest’s work – very light on the futurism and, as such, he remains simultaneously one of the most accessible and one of the most challenging sci-fi authors on the market. Expect Me Tomorrow is another great novel from a unique and original author.

‘Expect Me Tomorrow’ by Christopher Priest is published in the UK by Gollancz (2022)