Long before the notion of worldbuilding became catnip for writer’s workshops and convention panels, Christopher Priest was finding new ways to explore and exploit his massive Dream Archipelago, a string of thousands of islands on a world in which the two major countries on a massive continent waged an endless war, mostly through a frozen south polar wasteland much like Antarctica. While anomalies of time and gravity make traveling around the islands unpredictable and sometimes hazardous, there’s a great deal that looks familiar about them, and over the years Priest has kept updating his invented cultures so that, in