"The cream of Bayley's short fiction... complex, innovative, bold and striking." - Brian Stableford

The Great Short Fiction of Barrington Bayley
Nine brilliant stories of infinite space and alien consciousness, suffused with a sense of wonder...

Contents:
The Exploration of Space
The Bees of Knowledge
Exit from City 5
Me and My Antronoscope
All the King's Men
An Overload
Mutation Planet
The Problem of Morley's Emission
The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor

"..perhaps the most significant work BJB produced in the 1970s was in short fiction, most of it collected [here], a remarkable (though astonishingly bleak) assembly of experiments in the carrying of story ideas to the end of their tether." - John Clute

"[Knights Of The Limits] makes astonishing reading. It reminds one that the power of British New Wave was not due to its decalcifying treatment of sex or the fact that much of its readership was stoned. Those ephemera blew away with the hash fumes over Ladbroke Grove. What is left is sheer visionary intensity, which Bayley has always had and displays today even more vigorously." - Bruce Sterling

"These stories have all the distinguishing marks of Bayley's novels: typically a tightly controlled society is shattered by some technological or scientific development. [...] the ideas are the thing, and Bayley has more of them than almost anybody else."
- David Pringle

"Except for ALL THE KING'S MEN, which was written in the 1950s, these stories were written from the late 1960s to the l970s and aimed for the smoothness of execution typical of a type of science fiction I particularly admired. Contrarily the story I regarded as least successful in that regard, OVERLOAD, is the one to have been singled out most in newspaper reviews.

Although sometimes praised for originality, in fact I am a sedulous emulator. It pleased me when THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE was placed next to Jorge Luis Borges' THE LIBRARY OF BABEL in a Terry Carr anthology, the former owing something to the latter. During the 1960s Tom Disch was living in London and for a time occupied a rented room over mine, turning out his wonderful polished stories. Calling on him there one day, I made mention of Tolstoy's immense skill. "Yes," replied Tom, "he did everything the hardest way, and made it work." My God, I thought, I wouldn't even know the difference. I tried to use Disch's 'voice' and approach in ME AND MY ANTRONOSCOPE and don't know how it might have turned out without that influence. (A late acknowledgment, Tom; hope you dont mind!)" - Barrington Bayley