The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

The world is turning inside out…

Neil Prentice dares to try to turn the universe inside out, driven by forces he barely comprehends.

There is such terror in his mind that he drives down to Norton — a modern scientific complex in the West Country — to rid himself of a tormenting idea and to quell the voices which rage inside him. But the psychiatrists there are violently divided about his condition.

Is he someone who really understands the appalling consequences of the genetic engineering being carried on at Norton … does he know, by means of some completely inexplicable process, where the blanket use of antibiotics will lead … or the horrifying consequences of the chance bonding of molecules of plastic and the organic cells of life itself?

If he is merely mad, does that explain why there is madness gathering in the dark clouds over Norton?

Perhaps most worryingly is the answer to the question: is he the first person ever to pass through a celestial black hole?

If so, what they will find on the other side has the ability to shake the very foundations of their world…

This is a novel which reveals a link between schizophrenia and metaphysics and takes the reader into the unknown labyrinths of the psychotic’s world. In The Prayer Machine, we go round the Mobius twist to examine secrets which colossal laser-power can penetrate and explain. We travel a road that leads to places we have never been before, nor ever will again.

Genres: Science Fiction

263 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Christopher Hodder-Williams was an English writer, mainly of science fiction, but he wrote novels about aviation and espionage as well. Before his career in writing, Hodder-Williams joined the army in 1944, and served in the Middle East and lived in Kenya and New York, later settling in the UK. Many of his books are early examples of what would later be called techno-thrillers. He also worked as a composer and lyricist, and wrote numerous plays for television.

Reviews

[Zippergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A blast from the past, this gem from the 1970s is stripped down, straight to the heart future shock brain candy. No more, or less, confounding than The Time Travellers Wife, it's a nervous breakdown turned inside out. Or is it? How can other patients suffering from schizophrenia share your vision of a dystopic future a hundred years hence when GMOs will bond plastics and organisms in a fatal chimera? When the PUTER "is only obeying the masses; but paradoxically the masses have produced a situation where they have to obey the Puter." "It's non-ethical to upset the death rate."

Sigmund Freud, Roger Zelazny and H.G. Wells all play nicely together, though at times you might wonder if you, yourself, have missed your meds. The abundant dialog is staccato, running for pages, with stunningly beautiful passages, "Sometimes he saw her face, vignetted in stray light from the trail of iridescent comets which latticed the universe; then there would be a rushing sensation, a plummeting through space, a narrow tunnel through uncertainty and overlapping strips of time . . . events were superimposed on one another layer by layer, rather as one photographic transparency can be decked on another, and that on another, and so on, until none of them remains distinct. . . . Suppose you found you could move at will from one picture to another?" But, no worries, Hodder-Williams knows when to stop, no navel-gazing for five pages at a time, a la Zelazny.

I enjoyed the dry humor, the oblique commentary, "He was, after all, only obeying orders," and the future-speak where monitors are still televisions but thought is egologic and nano means now. Travel back to the past, your past perhaps if you remember Nixon and Fortran, and take a ride through a black hole to a future that may already be here.

[MR CHRISTOPHER · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readable fantasy

Christopher Hodder-Williams returns to the land of fantasy with this book. Although well written, and to a certain extent enjoyable as a novel, it doesn't compare to his aviation books.

[Venture Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is published by Venture Press.