2023 was a pretty average year for The Curse Of Electric Halibut, although there was a brief flurry of activity in the summer when Cormac McCarthy and Milan Kundera both died in quick succession. As if exhausted by the strain of taking down two mighty literary behemoths in quick succession, the Curse then kicked back and took the rest of the year off, leaving the authorial deaths total at three. 2015 remains the deadliest year on record with five.
But, evidently refreshed by the Christmas break, the Curse has started off the new year strongly by snuffing out Christopher Priest, author of two books on this list, Inverted World and The Affirmation. Priest was 80, which puts him slightly below the average age for inclusion, and the curse length of a little over nine years puts him slightly above the average, those numbers being just over 82 and just over six years respectively.
Priest was one of the authors included in Granta's Best Of Young British Novelists list in 1983, along with several other featurees on this list including Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, William Boyd and Graham Swift. Priest was older than most of those people (he scraped under the 40-year age limit by only a few months) and a bit of an outlier genre-wise, much of his output falling broadly into the category usually labelled "science fiction". I've rambled at tedious length about the stretchiness and meaninglessness of this term before, but while Inverted World is pretty definitely science fiction, The Affirmation is a science fiction novel only in the very loosest sense, and you could certainly reasonably ask the question whether it's more science-fiction-y than, say, Never Let Me Go.
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