Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008)

First read of Barrington Bayley's work.
The Fall of Chronopolis - Interesting ideas regarding time travel, with an imperial time corps at war with a future society. Basically ignores time travel paradoxes by having history repeating with the changes made. Unsure how original his ideas were, but the first time I'd quite read anything like it. Interesting enough plot to go along with the premise with a couple of interesting characters, but the majority stuck to the generic religious zealot that the society had become.

Collision with Chronos - Another time-travel story which has nothing in common with the other story. Earth is basically run by a society of nazis obsessed with racial purity. Hard to find any particularly likable characters in this story, but again follows a reasonable plot and has probably more sophisticated ideas about how time works.
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The story of Jasperodus, an advanced robot struggling to determine whether or not he is "conscious" serves as a springboard for philosophical conjecture, political theory, psychological observation, and social experiment. But as his journey comes full circle the ultimate solution to the central question---can a machine be aware?---is a bit of a stretch. Good storytelling however, especially in this age of ChatGPT, and a fine companion piece to Asimov's Robot series. I look forward to reading the sequel.… (more)

Bayley takes seriously the idea that science fiction should explore big concepts, but none of this gelled for me, and all the characters were just puppets, with the possible exception of one minor character who fades away after a couple of chapters. The biggest idea is this: the universe cycles, and repeats the identical sequence of events for eternity. The main character and others believe this is scientifically proven. The main character, a starship captain, through a Rube Goldberg sequence of events, suffered extreme pain beyond that any human has experienced for ten minutes. To avoid this happening again he must somehow change this cosmic cycle. None of that stands up to any kind of serious thought, and the conclusion seems to agree. Meanwhile, we also encounter boyish nymphgirls whose sexual goal is to be murdered so that the memory can be transferred to clones stashed away. Interesting but this leads nowhere. Near the end, we meet a cop whose pleasure is to use his authority and pheromonal enhancements to force his heterosexual underlings to have sex with him. This character disappears after a few pages. What was the point of bringing him up in the first place?

Not recommended.… (more)