Fantastic Metropolis

In contrast, The Soul of the Robot (1974) is a slighter work, with a much less dense pattern of ideas and a thinner prose texture. Most of the themes raised in this novel and its sequel, The Rod of Light (1985), have been dealt with more thoroughly by Sladek. Bayley was possibly gearing up for his most engrossing novel, The Garments of Caean (1976), a colourful, dandified and frilly epic with poisoned lining and a dénouement as abrupt as sharpened lapels. An array of flawed characters pin the plot in place, or are sewn onto the front of the tale like mismatched buttons. Dozens of SF standards cling to the hem of the book—the fashionable hero acquires a sentient suit, which gains control of his mind and eventually turns him into a ‘clothes-robot’ intent on carrying out the instructions of a weedy intelligence located on the edge of the galaxy. Peder Forbarth, sartorial cynic, manages to save the universe from one crisis only to precipitate a second, because of an unreasoning attachment to style. Caeanic society, a civilisation based on the Art of Attire, is suitably decadent, though not malicious, and—in a precarious twist—is shown to have evolved from an eccentric colony of Russian pseudorobots indulging in an eternal war with Japanese cyborgs. Absurd and magnificent, The Garments of Caean is Bayley at the peak of his considerable powers.

Having swept through a stellar Saville Row, Bayley turned his sights on Monte Carlo to produce an entertaining gambling novel, The Grand Wheel (1977). The wheel of the title has nothing to do with roulette, but is an arcane organisation which enjoys a galactic monopoly on games of chance. Not that chance stands much of a hope against Cheyne Scarne, professor of randomatics—the science of predicting random patterns. With its complex and elaborate card-games (Kabala is ‘so abstruse only a handful of people had succeeded in mastering it’) and the opportunity for outsiders to play their way into the Grand Wheel’s esoteric ranks, the cosmos seems up for grabs, but these stakes turn out to be a little too high. As backdrop to the hero’s hazardous flutters, the syndicate’s casino-temples infuse the script with a decor both seedy and elegant.

Increasingly offbeat, Bayley’s following novels, Star Winds (1978) and the Nietzschean thought-experiment The Pillars of Eternity (1982), are stiffer but still amazing expansions of ideas hinted at in earlier work. Harnessing the power of etheric travel, a ship sails off toward the horizon of the universe. Eternal Recurrence rears its monstrous and beautiful head again. Better, perhaps, to seek out The Knights of the Limits and The Seed of Evil (1979), the most intense story collections of the 1970s. Though the later volume contains the earlier and weaker tales, even these dazzle and delight. After ‘Double Time’, Bayley wrote very few unsuccessful pieces; a quick glance through back-issues of New Worlds should demonstrate that his short fiction adds as much to the magazine’s legend as the more fêted productions of Brian Aldiss or Thomas Disch. Without ‘Farewell, Dear Brother’ (1964), ‘Reactionary’ (1965) and ‘Aid To Nothing’ (1967), the New Wave may well have broken on mainstream shores. He preserved the science in a fiction which, under the emotional onslaught of such psycho-realists as Langdon Jones and Giles Gordon, came near to exchanging it for disembodied maturity.

Of Bayley’s later novels, The Zen Gun (1983) is the most bizarre and enjoyable. So many ideas are played off against each other that there is hardly any room for the reader to breathe. The problem with cramming this much invention into a single book is that the conceits tend to reduce the believability of the story, making the fiction more and more transparent. To counter this, the sub-plots need to strengthen each other by mirroring and magnifying themes. Bayley copes admirably, his cluttered style is cut with too much precision to snag on the brambles of nightschool technique. Besides, disdain for multiple ideas and simultaneous narrative is purely an English phenomenon, a misapplication of Occam’s Razor. If Bayley were Brazilian or Polish, we would all be reading him.

It is a pity that after The Zen Gun, Bayley seems to have slackened off; his armillary fantasy, The Forests of Peldain (1985), reads like an imitation of Jack Vance, but is not a sustainable effort. Short-stories continue to come from his unique imagination; at the start of the 1990s, examples of his work found their way into the small-press, notably ‘The Phobeya’ (1991), a collaboration with Sean Bayley. But it is difficult to predict where his reputation is headed. Despite extensive championing by the likes of Michael Moorcock and Andy Darlington, his unwillingness to betray space-opera keeps him from the attention of those biodegradable thirty-something readers who fawn over Ballard. The fact that the real four-colour problem has recently been solved does not help his best tale attain its rightful place in the anthologies. Our countries do not border undiscovered lands after all; but perhaps between our familiar literary heroes a master is waiting to be rediscovered.

This profile was first published in The Zone magazine (Issue #6, Winter 1997-98).