Fantastic Metropolis

This is an un-British way of conducting literature: we like ideas to wear a human face. Bayley is not really interested in psychology, emotion or character interaction. His heroes are the twists of logic which snatch each strand of plot in mid-write and weave them into something quite new. Bayley sometimes resembles a pulp Borges or soapy Lem—longer paragraphs and arty dialogue might have elevated him, if not into the gravitational fields of these masters, at least within radio-range of their spheres. But he seems reluctant to abandon his space-opera libretto, with its Doc Smith banter. In the early ’60s, Bayley, Moorcock and J.G. Ballard held meetings to plot the overthrow of ‘cardigan-and-chocolate-biscuits’ SF, exemplified by the likes of Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke. Bayley was the only one to attempt the coup by using an even less credible form. His penchant for analytical reasoning knits uneasily with his wide-screen baroque sensibilities; this skewed tailoring explains his minority appeal.

Bayley’s third novel was a long time coming. Empire of Two Worlds did not appear until 1972. Something of a disappointment when compared to his precise shorter work of the time, it is still an engrossing story, though completely overshadowed by its successor, the remarkable Collision Course (1973). Toying with the time theories of J.W. Dunne, this latter novel, a merciless thriller, is the most original exploration of chrono-paradox in modern SF. Clichés are ground to dust by the dynamic—overworked effects such as looped causality find no refuge here. The basis of the plot, that two separate ‘presents’ are moving toward each other from different times and that the meeting of realities will be disastrous, is presented with a detachment which adds to the menace. Bayley’s novels had finally attained the standard of his short-stories. Collision Course (published in Britain as Collision with Chronos) is not Bayley’s best novel—two finer efforts were to come—but it is more than worth seeking out, if only for the way it sidesteps every convention of its material.

Meanwhile, his shorter work was dealing with even more bizarre ideas and was threatening to push the genre over the edge of its own spectrum. He was gathering velocity for his superlative collection, The Knights of the Limits (1978). Such pieces as ‘Exit From City 5’ (1971), ‘Me And My Antronoscope’ (1973), ‘The Bees of Knowledge’ (1975) and ‘The Cabinet Of Oliver Naylor’ (1976), are fabrics woven from pure thought—the premise of each tale fulfils the functions usually reserved for the mechanics of fiction: the characters, plot-devices, prose style. Bayley’s best work is beyond these concerns. He does not need to crank a dynamic by artificial means; once generated, the idea starts a chain-reaction which gives birth to the story. No further toil is required from the author: the gravity of the primary notion either pulls the standard trappings around it or else swallows them whole. Bayley seems to have written these tales by knocking two protons together and standing back to watch.

His masterpiece in this respect is ‘The Four-Colour Problem’ (1971), a tale which at first glance resembles a dissertation on geometry. There are a number of mathematical lectures embedded in the text, but these are never too technical for digestion. To further soften their impact, Bayley adopts a darkly comic tone which owes much to William Burroughs. The plot involves the amazing discovery that geography is ‘wrong’ and that between political borders lie weird new countries. The explanation for this state of affairs is highly ingenious and concerns the real four-colour problem. Cartographers have long known that just four colours are required to fill in any map so that no colour borders itself—but mathematics yields only a proof for five colours. Bayley’s response is that there must exist maps which really do require five colours and that our globe is one of these. The ‘missing’ countries exist in dimensions tangential to our own. During the course of the tale, efforts are made to probe these interstices, with unexpected and darkly humorous consequences.

Two other stories of note, less clever and more accessible, are ‘The Exploration Of Space’ and ‘Man In Transit’ (both 1972). The former begins with the opium-eating narrator lectured by a chessboard piece; the lesson concerns non-Euclidian space. Combining romantic and logical aesthetics, this Coleridge-in-Flatland whimsy is a knight’s tour-de-force. The latter is the relatively simple account of an orphan adopted by an airline. This odd tale is closer to Ballard with its implied landscapes of turbulence, stewardesses and plastic food-trays.

Bayley’s next novel, The Fall of Chronopolis (1974), is possibly the ultimate time-travel story, sweeping the corners of the sub-genre for the few dusty paradoxes missed by previous writers. Unlike Collision Course, there is no attempt to take the theme off at a wild tangent. 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. There are no loose ends; if there were any, a single tug would unravel the entire narrative. The Chronotic Empire straddles the centuries like a beached whale, its agents phasing between levels of orthogonal time to fight a sub-temporal adversary. The book remains faithful to its pulp paradigms (‘With a hollow booming sound the Third Time Fleet materialised on the windswept plain’) without quite permitting the sets to dominate the script.