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"Spectacular" - Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

There is real time... and there is potential time.

By controlling the difference, the Chronotic Empire came into existence and maintained itself over a thousand years of human history. Its Time Fleets, armadas of time-travelling fortresses, patrolled its temporal borders relentlessly, blotting out potential-time deviations, erasing errors of history that might undermine the empire.

But nevertheless the empire's days were numbered, for somewhere in its own future was the century of the Hegemony, its implacable enemy.

"Bayley's work is the dark jewel of British science fiction. Bayley is the author of some of the most intelligent space opera, the most lethally intricate time paradoxes, and the most startlingly metaphysical sf ever written. Bayley's has been a profound influence for forty years. Buy this book, be blown away, spread the word." - Stephen Baxter

"The Fall of Chronopolis roasts all the chestnuts in a monumental hearth; causal loops abound, sub-plots are allowed to swallow their own tales, futures impinge on presents and pasts cavort with elsewheres. Bayley, however, employs a wealth of such devices, meshing them together so tightly that, while they may not seem fresh, they still startle." - Rhys Hughes

I hope it is not immediately evident that this novel is influenced by my particular science fictional hero, Charles Harness, particularly by his novelette TIME TRAP and by his novel FLIGHT INTO YESTERDAY (aka THE PARADOX MEN).

Causal cycles in time, usually accomplished by time travel of some kind, is Harness's recurrent theme. He is also a grand exponent of what Brian Aldyss has called 'wide screen baroque'. I would like to think that THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS is an example of wide screen baroque.

The idea that everyone's life is a ceaseless circle in time, a religious belief in the novel, is not original. It was propounded in all seriousness by the mystical Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, who is said to have become obsessed by it. I do not know whether Ouspensky realized it was not original to him either. Both the Pythagoreans and the Stoics of the ancient world taught that the whole universe follows such a cycle. In this form it has been used in science fiction repeatedly. The doctrine is identical with Ouspensky's 'personal' eternal recurrence if followed to its conclusion. Any two adjacent leaves in a closed book touch one another at all points.

However the idea of a wave motion in time, with nodes which provide temporal continents, is not one I have encountered elsewhere.