num_pages: 239
description: The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the optimum and into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they're carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. Yet the city is in crisis. People are growing restive. The population is dwindling. The rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world he's about to discover is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
language: English
title: The Inverted World
titlecomplete: The Inverted World
characters: Helward Mann
genres: Classics, British Literature, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction
ratings_count: 8688
awards: awardedAt: 157795200000
name: Hugo Award
category: Best SF Novel, awardedAt: 157795200000
name: Locus Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 126259200000
name: British Science Fiction Association Award
category: Best SF Novel
publisher: Harper & Row (NYC)