Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

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Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008) was a UK writer active as a freelance under various names in the 1950s, often working as P. F. Woods and (with his editor and colleague Michael Moorcock) as Michael Barrington. During his prolific early years in particular, he wrote juvenile stories, comics, picture-strips and features as well as sf, which he began to publish with ‘Combat’s End’ for Vargo Science Fiction Magazine #4 in 1954. The best of his early work appears in The Seed of Evil (coll 1979), a retrospective assembled to honour his substantial career. All his sf novels were published under his own name, beginning with Star Virus (1970). This complex and somewhat gloomy space epic, along with some of its successors, had a strong though not broadly recognized influence on such UK sf writers as M. John Harrison. Perhaps because Bayley’s style is sometimes laboured and his lack of cheerful endings is alien to the expectations of readers of conventional Space Opera, he never received adequate recognition for the hard-edged control he exercised over plots, whose typically intricate dealings in Time Paradoxes, and their insistent highly focused metaphysical drive, make them some of the most formidable works of their type. Though Annihilation Factor (1972), Empire of Two Worlds (1972) and Collision Course (1973; vt Collision with Chronos 1977) – which utilizes the time theories of J. W. Dunne – are all variously successful, probably his most fully realized Time Paradox or Time Police space opera is The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) (see below).

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