Review of Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest

Most avid readers have their favorite authors, and 2024 has been been merciful to a few of mine. Terry Bisson and Howard Waldrop both passed away, taking with them unique, meaningful voices of speculative fiction. And the year likewise took Christopher Priest, a giant in the field. A book published just two years ago, Expect Me Tomorrow (2022).

Expect Me Tomorrow rotates through three time periods/perspectives, steadily revealing the relationship between them. Told in brief, dry snippets akin to a history book, the first perspective is the story of a Victorian confidence trickster named John Smith who was found guilty of cheating women out of their valuables. The second is told in a warm, first-person perspective with a classic English lilt.  It tells of a pair of Norwegian twins in the mid 19th century, Adolph and Adler. Night and day in terms of career interests, Adler is an academic researcher interested in climate who ends up spending many years in the US pursuing knowledge while his brother Adolph is an opera singer who tours South America. And the third perspective is an alternate take on our modern times, written in Priest's precise prose, in which a police profiler has a piece of network tech installed in his head giving him direct access to the internet. Disparate stories at the outset, Priest slowly weaves these three into a single tale.

How well Priest weaves the tales is another story (sorry). After consuming thousands of speculative fiction books and stories from across the centuries, including hundreds of individual authors and writers, I put Priest among the ten best ever to do it. Technique, theme, character, plot—he's the complete package. Expect Me Tomorrow, while being a complete package, lacks a certain something.

That certain something is a common purpose—a soul, for lack of a better term. I suppose it's possible to boil the novel down to: 'the difficulties of doppelgangers', but that feels more incidental than substantial. In the exact same fashion, the major science fiction likewise feel tacked on, namely the cli-fi and cyberpunk bits—strange to say for a Priest novel, but true. And the novel's conclusion just wraps up the plot threads, no grander scheme elucidated. A mix of interesting ideas do carry the novel, but they never gel into something transcendent as so many other Priest novels do.

But just to make sure potential readers have proper perspective on Expect Me Tomorrow, a slightly off day for Priest is still a better day than the majority of writers. Technique, as seemingly always, is spot on. The crisp sentences flow deceptively, gently introducing readers to normal situations steadily revealed to have layers of nuance. I may complain the novel has no soul, but it remains imminently readable.

In the end, Expect Me Tomorrow, like a couple other Priest's novels (The Separation and The Prestige), plays with the idea of twins, in this case two pairs (a twinning of twins?). Multi-generational, Priest riffs off British 19th century history, and leads into an alternate present where a cyberpunk-ish bit of tech and climate change drive a look backwards in time to family history. The novel will not challenge earlier entries in Priest's oeuvre as 'the best', but it does deliver on a multi-layered plot delivered in Priest's impeccable prose.

RIP Chris, you've left an indelible mark on not just speculative fiction but literature in general, such is the transcendence of your fiction.