Fantastic Metropolis

I first met Barry Bayley in either 1955 or 56 at the old Globe Tavern near Leather Lane, which is the area I ‘expanded’ to contain the fictional Brookgate of several of my London stories. Barry frequently put me up at his place and we shared a flat together while working on an aborted novella for E.J. Carnell, ‘Duel Among the Wine-Green Suns’. We would once or twice a week meet J.G. Ballard in Kensington and we would talk about the boring conventions of science fiction and how we intended to change the world of literature as we knew it. We saw the best sf serving as some kind of potential marriage between literary and popular fiction. That remained our goal throughout this period. New Worlds was ready to go long before I was approached to edit it by David Warburton, who until then had been famous for publishing Hank Janson books. Barry and I were working writers, taking on pretty much anything we could get. This improved Barry’s speed and taught me to write as rapidly as I still more or less do. When you are running on daily and weekly deadlines, often with only a few hours to produce a piece, you learn to think on your feet and not get too self-conscious about an idea. There’ll always be another one along in a minute. Barry has a massive brain. It is too big for his skull. Once you could get him awake, you just thumped his head and two or three more ideas would spill out. I’d have them down on paper before he realised they were his. However, I had my compensations for being the dumb one in the partnership. Barry, who is frankly dwarfish in stature, and I, a tall, godlike blond giant, made strange company. I remember one day we were walking along King’s Road, Chelsea, when it was still an ordinary place to live, we glimpsed ourselves side by side in a shop mirror and fell about helplessly laughing. We were like two different species, almost. I always got the larger portions in the greasy spoons we ate in. I think the matronly waitresses had decided Barry was beyond fattening up.

Though we often thought very similarly and complemented each other’s imaginations—Barry’s logic, my romantic invention—Barry’s invention, my ability as a story-teller—we did not always share the same sense of humour. I remember Barry becoming positively puritanical during the episode in which I tried to set fire to the underground carriage in which we were all travelling. This led to a set of consequences recalled by, among others, Tom Disch when I was not quite at one with myself. If only there was such a thing as group amnesia, when you’ve made a total and highly memorable pratt of yourself. Barry, in these letters, is considerably forgiving, it seems to me. But I am sure I’ve been just as generous to him in some way or another. (Come to think of it, his bringing a drunken ‘friend’ he’d met in the pub to my house and friend being thoroughly sick face down in my bed, might help the balance). We’ve been friends for so long, you can take such things for granted. This is the beginning of a correspondence in which, knowing it to be for public consumption, we deliberately tried to recall our impressions of a past when the worst thing we had to worry about was the H-Bomb. Not, come to think of it, that many of us did worry much about it. We left that sort of thing to John Brunner, who wrote the CND marching song, ‘Don’t You Hear the H-Bomb’s Thunder’. Ballard had particular reason to be fond of the Bomb, as had Aldiss, and we were as interested in the things nuclear energy could power as we were in worrying about getting blown up. We hadn’t worried during the V-bomb raids on London and an H-Bomb was an altogether more humane alternative. We never learned to start worrying. We all loved technology, especially its potential for the arts, and that was why few of our stories ever debated the conventional worries of the day. Though, oddly, we were a lot more interested in ecology than those who dismissed our work as self-indulgent. We also, as Bayley has done, had a way of coming up with fundamental scientific notions which appear to escape most of the technical lads over at Analog, whose contributors were confidently predicting World Peace and the discovery of perpetual motion by the end of the 20th century. Anyway, rough and ready as it is, here’s our correspondence to date.

—Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock: What if I ask you if you can remember when and where we first met. Do you remember? Globe? Pete Taylor?

Barrington J. Bayley: Casting my creaky memory back half a century (it’s like my creaking hard drive, which has too little RAM support, so groans away and everything takes a long time), I started going to sf’s meeting place in the bar of the Globe in London’s Hatton Gardens while I was still in the RAF. The first person I ever met there was John Brunner, who spotted me hovering nervously in the doorway, advertising my fannishness by displaying a copy of New Worlds, and he invited me to join him.