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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. |
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