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This review is available here without
the permission of the copyright holder.Originally
published in "Vector #89", September 1978.
Copyright Chris Evans, 1978.
THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS by Barrington J. Bayley
(Daw Books; New York; June 1974; 95c; ISBN 451-1114-095)
THE GRAND WHEEL by Barrington J. Bayley
(Daw Books; New York; August 1977; ISGN 0-87997-318-8)
reviewed by Chris Evans
Science
fiction is supposedly an imaginative literature, it's
prime function being to explore unfamiliar ideas and
situations. But it is a sad fact that of the multitude of
sf books published each year, very few contain any real
speculative element. Most are stock adventure stories
which incorporate the standard props of the genre as mere
decorations or gimmicks to provide plot-twists. Sf of
this nature has much in common with westerns and romantic
fiction: it offers, essentially, variations on a theme,
providing the reader with a series of familiar images and
scenario which follows a predictable, time-honoured
pattern. Avid readers of this kind of fiction generally
baulk at extreme manifestations of originality because
what they are seeking is a continuous and comfortable
reaffirmation of their fantasies. As a consequence,
publishers often have a tendency to prefer work which
will not strain their readers' imaginations unduly.
Barrington Bayley is one of the most inventive and
idiosyncratic writers in the genre; his short stories,
especially, read like no-one else's. He has been writing
sf for two decades, yet it is only comparatively recently
that he has found a regular market for his novels. I
suspect that the major reason for this is that publishers
were afraid to risk their necks on such obviously
original work.
Barry Bayley's books are written in the pulp idiom - by
which I mean that his plots are fast-paced and
action-packed, with the fate of a world or a solar system
in the balance - but his subject matter extends far
beyond the limited horizons of the pulp format. I met the
authro recently and he told me that his aim was to
provide an entertaining narrative in which to embody his
ideas. He is not primarily interested in character; his
concerns are philosophical and metaphysical, and each of
his books seems to be set in a self-contained universe
with its own set of weird and wonderful laws.
Consider:
"Orthogonal time is but the surface of the
bottomless ocean of potential time, or the temporal
substratum: the hidden dimension of eternity in which all
things co-exist without progression from past to
future... Time is composed of a wave structure. The nodes
of the waves travel at intervals of approximately one
hundred and seventy years and are of crucial importance
for the business of time-travel, since they comprise
'rest points' in the tensioning of the Chronotic energy
field." (THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS, pps 31-32)
and:
"Randomatics rested on certain unexpected
discoveries that had been made in the essential mystery
of number. It had been discovered that, below a certain
very high number, permutating a set of independent
elements did not produce a sequence that was strictly
random. Preferred sub-structures appeared in any 'chance'
run, and these could be predicted. Only when the number
of independent elements entered the billions .. did
predictability vanish. This was the realm of
'second-order chance', distinguished from 'first-order
chance' in that it was chance in the old sense: pure
probability unadulterated by calculable runs and
groupings." (THE GRAND WHEEL, p. 9)
Bayley has a delightfully fertile imagination,
formulating his preposterous concepts with seeming ease,
then slotting them into his vigorous narratives and
developing them with such thoroughness that any reader
with a sense of wonder cannot fail to be carried along by
the sheer intellectual stimulus of the ideas. These two
books, replete with their visions of absolute power and
their glimpses of the underlying structures of the
universe seem at times to be far removed from any present
reality or probable future. Yet the author's mastery of
his material and his insistence on providing rational
explanations for the most outrageous events gives each
book an internal consistency which makes it impossible to
dismiss them as mere whimsy. They fall into that sphere
of sf which Brian Aldiss has christened "wide screen
baroque" and in so doing they provide us with
bayley's most obvious progenitor: Charles Harness. Much
of Bayley's work, like Harness', deals with the
interaction of polarities: science vs art (or religion);
chance vs predictability; light vs darkness; mutability
vs immutability. So the Chronotic Empire battles against
the Hegemony and its time-distorters to preserve the
integrity of the temporal stream; so the legitimacy
struggles with the Grand Wheel to prevent the
organisation, with its belief in the rule of chance, from
gaining overall power in the solar system. Underlying
these conflicts is the principle of entropy, an over-used
term in sf criticism, but one which nonetheless seems
perfectly applicable to Bayley's oeuvre. All physical
systems have a tendency to move towards a state of
increasing randomness or disorder, and thus eventually
the entire universe must run down like a spent clockwork
toy, its energies dissipated and darkness prevailing.
Man, himself a product of a freak, anti-entropic process
(a series of chance combinations of molecules which
eventually became self-replicating) struggles against
this tendency towards decay but ultimately can fight only
a rearguard action since the conclusions of the second
law of thermodynamics are inescapable. Bayley recognises
this, but he is still fascinated by the struggles and
invents in these fictions ways by which man may cheat his
ultimate fate. If the Chronotic Empire can defeat the
Hegemony then its people will achieve some form of
immortality since when each person dies their souls are
immediately transported back to the time of their births
and thei begin living their lives again, although without
knowledge of their 'previous' existence. This theme of
continual rebirth is the same one that Charles Harness
explored in THE RING OF RITORNEL, and it is clear that
both authors share very similar concerns. In THE GRAND
WHEEL there is no obvious evidence of the ultimate decay,
but even so Bayley has one of his characters dispersed
into "pure randomness" only to reappear in a
kind of phantom zone from where he may eventually
re-enter the physical universe. In a sense, these books
are out-and-out fantasies, but fantasies of the highest
calibre; they engage the mind like the abstract puzzles
which might have little practical relevance but are
nonetheless still fascinating to contemplate. Bayley is a
member of that rare breed of true visionaries who are not
afraid to look the universe straight in the eye and ask:
"What makes you tick?".
One last point. I said earlier that Bayley is not
interested in character, but comparing these two novels
one can see a development in this area.
CHRONOPOLIS, published in 1974, contains only the most
redimentary characterisation, whereas THE GRAND WHEEL, of
1977 vintage, shows that the author is capable of
instilling personality into his human creations. This is
an advance which I thoroughly welcome; after all, there's
no reason why an author shouldn't juggle with the
mind-boggling concepts and provide his readers
with some character delineation, is there? On this
evidence I'd say that Barry Bayley is still growing in
strength as a novelist, and all that remains is to add my
voice to the belated but growing chorus of acclaim for
Bayley's work and to urge everyone to get acquainted with
it.
(An irrelevant afternote: There is a story, probably
apocryphal, of the time when Bayley, unable to sell his
short-stories to Ted Carnell's NEW WRITINGS IN SF, began
submitting them under the pseudonym P. F. Woods. They
sold. Reverting to his real name, he submitted another
story which was rejected by Carnell with an accompanying
note to the effect that "You should write stories
like that P. F. Woods fellow". Is it any wonder that
writers are often prone to curse editors?)
-
Chris Evans, 1978
thanks
to Mike Cross
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