This is the second Priest book I've read lately, and was one of his earliest, about an alternate future in which Wessex is separated from mainland England by seismic action and becomes a tourist destination in a world where Soviet Russia controls England and Middle Eastern oil interests have taken over the U.S.. It's not technically the future - it's a future that is "projected" by a group of scientists who "dream" collectively while unconscious in a projection machine.
Interesting story, but hard to follow at the end when multiple projections start overlapping, and you're not real sure what's going on. In addition, the basic premise - that the characters are far happier in this "dream of Wessex" than they are in the present, where constant urban bombings throughout England (sound familiar?) and economic crisis just doesn't connect for this American reader because in this particular future, England is a satellite state of Russia, and party apparatchiks run the country. This mild future may be attractive to English readers of the 1970's, but the only thing I can compare it to is a benevolent 1984 and it's not someplace I'd be comfortable, so matter how nice the surroundings. I'll take crisis over dominance by a foreign power any day, but that's probably just a dissonance between a modern American reader and a 1970's English one, where a benevolent socialism was probably a lot more realtic future (and more attractive) than the way things were going to hell in a handbasket at the time. Restore a constitutional monarchy to the story's future, and I'd probably buy into the characters' motivation a lot better.