Content levels
Trigger warnings
Positive tags
Hero archetypes
Heroine archetypes
Protagonist archetypes
Tropes
Themes
Synopsis
Priest, a young Britisher with a flair for finding quietly tantalizing sci-fi hypotheses, works some clever variations on the well-worn notions of the dream-world and alternate world. ""The perfect lover"" is an imaginary place--Wessex, product of a 1985 experiment in group illusion being conducted near Dorchester. The participants have been hypnotically projected into a ""future"" which has been laid out along general guidelines but then allowed to develop into the sum of their communal imaginings. Their unconscious bodies rest in elaborate life-support systems while they go about their Wessex lives sealed off from any memory of ""previous"" existence. The world they have made--an island cut off from England by the ""Blandford Passage"" and the ""Somerset Sea""--is a lovely resort, serenely divorced from Soviet England and its concerns. Four years into the project, a new director is brought in: Paul Mason, a cunning sociopath bent on reshaping the imaginative consensus on which the idyll of Wessex rests. Only two participants are able to resist his control: Julia Stretton, his former mistress, and her new lover David Harkman, who has developed a strange immunity to the post-hypnotic triggers which periodically withdraw the others from their trance. Priest develops his ingenious premise with unobtrusive grace, but somehow not with the thoroughness it deserves. The idea really demands a longer, slowermoving narrative with a larger weight of detail. Perhaps the chief flaw here is the character of Mason, a particularly flimsy cardboard villain where Priest's provocative design demands a figure of real menace.
Is The Perfect Lover appropriate for my child?
Suitable for most readers 16 and up.
This cerebral sci-fi novel explores themes of psychological manipulation and reality through a dream-world experiment. Contains a sociopathic antagonist who manipulates others through hypnotic control and mild tension around power dynamics and gaslighting.
What to know going in
This book has mild violence, mild sexual content, and mild language. Content notes include captivity, manipulation, and gaslighting (see the full list above).
Who'll love this
Teens interested in mind-bending sci-fi about alternate realities and the nature of consciousness will find this thought-provoking.