Fantastic Metropolis

Continued from “The Bayley-Moorcock Letters: An Old Farts’ Fireside Chat.”

Michael Moorcock: I was thinking of our fascination with pseudo-science and how we found ourselves meeting some odd people in those early days. I remember that you independently invented the famous Dean non-reaction drive which John W. Campbell publicised in Astounding in the 1960s. So you were able to refute Dean fairly swiftly! Do you remember that? How old were you when you came up with the idea originally?

Barrington Bayley: Yes, in my mid-teens, I think. I’m one of countless people to have got the same crackpot idea, including I believe rocket pioneer Goddard, America’s counterpart of von Braun. My diagrams were identical to ones later published by Campbell and to descriptions of Dean’s design. I imagined two counter-rotating ellipsoidal weighted rotors with movable axes of rotation able to take up positions in the centre and both extremities of the rotors, so that the rotors’ upswing would consistently involve the greater mass. At the same time each rotor would restrain the other from turning about its centre of gravity. I was never naïve enough to think Newton’s third law of motion could be sidestepped so easily, but what puzzled me for quite a long time was that I couldn’t see why it wouldn’t work. Whenever I tried to follow the interplay of forces the result seemed to be a net impulse in one direction. It was a case of not seeing the wood for the trees. A connected system still has a centre of gravity, now matter how its parts are rearranged.

Dean is one “inventor” of the non-reaction drive who went ahead and tried to construct it. I remember you and I talking one day to a visiting American who had met Dean (can you remember who that was?) and had him demonstrate his gadget crawling along the floor, forgetting, I would presume, that the floor gave it something to react against. Such a gadget would travel even if mounted on a trolley (I myself have crossed a room standing on a small trolley, holding on to the hand rail and jerking back and forth). Given enough power, it could leap into the air (only to fall back down again).

Michael Moorcock: I think the visiting American who told us about the Dean Drive might have been Burt Filer. Or was it before we met Burt?

Barrington Bayley: The guy who met Dean was someone I never heard of before and would have no idea of his name now, so Burt Filer is a possibility, though that might be a young sf writer who came along later and asked me did I write science fantasy or clank-clank (his term for hard sf). He pronounced himself a writer of clank-clank.

Michael Moorcock: Sounds like Burt’s sense of humour. He was the first person I ever met who made a living as an inventor. When asked what he did, he said “I’m an inventor”. He’d designed some interesting stuff and sold his patents to a backer who specialised in payrolling inventors! He was building a circular flute the last I saw of him. He had the model all ready. It was designed to increase the range of the conventional flute without extending the tube, as it were. Mike Harrison and I went up to Scotland with Burt, walking around Ben Nevis. It was a great trip, even if Burt nearly got bashed to bits by a bunch of repressed Scots at a Saturday Night Dance. He tried to pick up a girl, not knowing that all the girls stuck together on one side of the floor and all the lads on the other, yet many of them were engaged! Mike and I had warned him. We left the dance early but Burt was determined. Next we saw of him he was pale and shaken while downstairs outside some poor bugger was getting the shit beaten out of him (maybe Burt’s substitute). I went down to try to help the bloke and all the bouncers were inside, hiding. I got out there eventually and all I found was blood and a pair of smashed glasses… Burt got involved with a school-teacher in London and slipped off into the night. I remember that he had a bit part in the movie of Death of Grass (Cornell Wilde!) because he could ride a motorbike. Wonder what happened to him. Maybe he was swallowed by one of his own inventions. The Moebius Flute? I know he shared our enjoyment of wacky pseudo-science.

Barrington Bayley: Pseudo-science is a fascinating field, synthesised from the elaborated development of the exact sciences and an inexhaustible human resource: looniness. It’s a sort of mixture of hopefulness and “scientism”: an imagined idea of hard knowledge. We are going to see more and more of it mixed with ill-disciplined experimentation (recent examples are the “cold fusion” and “memory water” claims).