Sci-fi story by Christopher Priest (Spoiler)

[Dragice]

I'm pretty sure it's a short story or novel by Christopher Priest. There might be a spoiler below.

The main character sometimes has brief hallucinations showing the city in which they live as ruined and ugly. Later we learn that this is how the city actually is, and the character uses a device that transforms perception to make reality more acceptable.

[Justanotherbiblophile]

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/p/ch...

Says your options (for short stories) are (novel list also available):

The Interrogator (1969)
The Perihelion Man (1969)
Real-Time World [short story] (1971)
The Head and the Hand (1972)
The Inverted World [short story] (1973)
Men of Good Value (1975)
An Infinite Summer [short story] (1976)
The Negation (1978)
The Watched (1978) - Hugo (nominee)
Whores (1978)
Palely Loitering (1979) - Hugo (nominee)
The Miraculous Cairn (1980)

[Kris]

The Glamour, The Affirmation, or The Inverted World by Christopher Priest?

Around what year did you read this book?

[Dragice]

Around 2000-2005 I think

[Gareth]

You could be thinking of a couple of stories with this setting by Chris Beckett: 'The Perimeter' and 'Piccadilly Circus'. They are collected in his anthology 'The Turing Test', which has cover art featuring this concept.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

[Dragice]

Thanks Gareth! These are not the stories I had in mind but they are very close. I think they'll help me get closer to the answer. It looks like K. Dick's "Time Out Of Joint" is a source of inspiration for those two stories, so maybe that's the one I've read and I mixed up with Christopher Priest.