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Collision with Chronos
Collision with Chronos
169 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 1972
4 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
Barrington J. Bayley
71 books40 followersBarrington J. Bayley published work principally under his own name but also using the pseudonyms ofAlan Aumbry, Michael Barrington (with Michael Moorcock), John Diamond and P.F. Woods.
Bayley was born in Birmingham and educated in Newport, Shropshire. He worked in a number of jobs before joining the Royal Air Force in 1955; his first published story, "Combat's End", had seen print the year before in UK-only publication Vargo Statten Magazine.
During the 1960s, Bayley's short stories featured regularly in New Worlds magazine and later in its successor, the paperback anthologies of the same name. He became friends with New Worlds editor Michael Moorcock, who largely instigated science fiction's New Wave movement. Bayley himself was part of the movement.
Bayley's first book, Star Virus, was followed by more than a dozen other novels; his downbeat, gloomy approach to novel writing has been cited as influential on the works of M. John Harrison, Brian Stableford and Bruce Sterling.
Bayley was born in Birmingham and educated in Newport, Shropshire. He worked in a number of jobs before joining the Royal Air Force in 1955; his first published story, "Combat's End", had seen print the year before in UK-only publication Vargo Statten Magazine.
During the 1960s, Bayley's short stories featured regularly in New Worlds magazine and later in its successor, the paperback anthologies of the same name. He became friends with New Worlds editor Michael Moorcock, who largely instigated science fiction's New Wave movement. Bayley himself was part of the movement.
Bayley's first book, Star Virus, was followed by more than a dozen other novels; his downbeat, gloomy approach to novel writing has been cited as influential on the works of M. John Harrison, Brian Stableford and Bruce Sterling.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 7, 2020
DAW Collectors #43
Cover Artist: Chris Foss
Bayley, Barrington John, Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, UK,9 April 1937 - 14 October 2008
Alternate Names: Alan Aumbry, Barrington John Bayley, Barington Dž. Bejli, James Colvin, John Diamond, P. F. Woods, Peter Woods.
A Variant Title for this book was: "Collision With Chronos"
The book is based on a hard science Fiction premise, the intersection of two time waves, one from the future heading into the past, and the “present”, heading into the future. Ihere are two “presents” moving towards each other with the possibility of annihilation.
The “now” band of time is but a side effect of the universe and not a principle. The time bands crops up at varying points heading in varying directions across infinite universes. What’s so interesting about this interpretation of time and time travel is that most time travel cliches (time loops, meeting oneself in the past) are done away with. Time travel novels tend to follow the same ground in slightly different paths.
"Collision Course" is a breath of fresh air as far as Time Travel books go, n the story Henske, an archaeologist, works at an archaeological dig at an “ancient” city. However, mysterious evidence crops up that the ruins are actually, inexplicably, getting younger.
Bayley, A long-time friend of Michael Moorcock, gave him a great deal of early exposure in his role as editor of New Worlds in the 1960s and 1970s, Barrington Bayley was a member of threesome including Moorcock and J G Ballard which plotted to overthrow traditional science fiction.
Cover Artist: Chris Foss
Bayley, Barrington John, Birthplace: Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, UK,9 April 1937 - 14 October 2008
Alternate Names: Alan Aumbry, Barrington John Bayley, Barington Dž. Bejli, James Colvin, John Diamond, P. F. Woods, Peter Woods.
A Variant Title for this book was: "Collision With Chronos"
The book is based on a hard science Fiction premise, the intersection of two time waves, one from the future heading into the past, and the “present”, heading into the future. Ihere are two “presents” moving towards each other with the possibility of annihilation.
The “now” band of time is but a side effect of the universe and not a principle. The time bands crops up at varying points heading in varying directions across infinite universes. What’s so interesting about this interpretation of time and time travel is that most time travel cliches (time loops, meeting oneself in the past) are done away with. Time travel novels tend to follow the same ground in slightly different paths.
"Collision Course" is a breath of fresh air as far as Time Travel books go, n the story Henske, an archaeologist, works at an archaeological dig at an “ancient” city. However, mysterious evidence crops up that the ruins are actually, inexplicably, getting younger.
Bayley, A long-time friend of Michael Moorcock, gave him a great deal of early exposure in his role as editor of New Worlds in the 1960s and 1970s, Barrington Bayley was a member of threesome including Moorcock and J G Ballard which plotted to overthrow traditional science fiction.
April 5, 2017
This is the third I've read by Bayley where he takes the quotidian ideas about "time" and pretzelizes them. What if time is a local phenomenon, not a universal one, and what if it is a wave front where the only thing that matters is "now": the future is barren and empty because nothing's there yet, and the past is a spent thing devoid of consciousness. Multiple timestreams / time-waves can exist, and travel in any direction relative to a reference point. Collision of wave fronts is cataclysmic and obliterates both.
It has some beautiful imagery and thoughts. Alien ruins age in reverse, because they are part of a timestream approaching from the far future. A vast alien intelligence traveling in its own wavefront whose identity is neither singular ("I") nor group ("we"), and prefers the pronoun "here" instead.
The entire attitude of the Titan Legion, the racial purists, whose whole philosophy and theology hinge on a previous alien invasion that the facts uncovered by archeology and biology are bent to agree with their established dogma.
While far less gonzo and quirky than his others--it is practically sedate by his standards--it remains a "big picture" production where details and ramifications are swept aside, and if you pick at any particular flaw the whole thing falls apart.
It has some beautiful imagery and thoughts. Alien ruins age in reverse, because they are part of a timestream approaching from the far future. A vast alien intelligence traveling in its own wavefront whose identity is neither singular ("I") nor group ("we"), and prefers the pronoun "here" instead.
The entire attitude of the Titan Legion, the racial purists, whose whole philosophy and theology hinge on a previous alien invasion that the facts uncovered by archeology and biology are bent to agree with their established dogma.
While far less gonzo and quirky than his others--it is practically sedate by his standards--it remains a "big picture" production where details and ramifications are swept aside, and if you pick at any particular flaw the whole thing falls apart.
June 16, 2024
And just like that, I’m a BJ Bailey fan!
Books like this are the reason why I prefer reading older books - there’s so much packed into this slim book.
This future society of “true men”( read Nazis) while fighting to maintain their racial purity by removing deviant, lower races, discovers ancient alien ruins that are aging in reverse!
This discovery prompts a time travel expedition including the physicist who built the time machine and the archeologists who was studying the ancient alien ruins.
The rest of the book is so different from any time travel books I’ve ever read I’ll be thinking about it for a while.
Some of the ideas reminded me of Carlo Rovelli’s book: The order of time. The concept that “now” for you is a local effect, and isn’t the same everywhere. Some of the other concepts may not be Rovelli approved but are very interesting. There are many different “now’s” moving in different directions and two of them are going to collide!
I’m on the lookout for more Barrington J Bailey books.
I love finding authors who were as good or better than their peers at the time but aren’t remembered as well.
Sensitive readers be warned: the evil space nazis make incessant use of racial slurs.
August 1, 2012
I like Bayley for his whacky plots and absurd mash-ups. Read "Zen Gun" if you ever want a space opera mini-epic that plunges into some weird territory while keeping things fresh and fun.
If you like what you read, consider picking up this book towards the end of Bayley's repertoire. The ideas here are interesting: What follows is less so. You've got an Evil Empire, some heroic scientists, a few revolutionaries, and a more advanced race. This is Star Trekky stuff with different names and labels--and a dose of racial slurs, courtesy of said Evil Empire, who has a repellent stance towards anyone who looks or speaks differently. Unfortunately, Bayley lays this race-hate on thick and employs slurs throughout the text with Twain-like frequency.
On the plus side, this did whet my appetite for more science fiction in the near future.
If you like what you read, consider picking up this book towards the end of Bayley's repertoire. The ideas here are interesting: What follows is less so. You've got an Evil Empire, some heroic scientists, a few revolutionaries, and a more advanced race. This is Star Trekky stuff with different names and labels--and a dose of racial slurs, courtesy of said Evil Empire, who has a repellent stance towards anyone who looks or speaks differently. Unfortunately, Bayley lays this race-hate on thick and employs slurs throughout the text with Twain-like frequency.
On the plus side, this did whet my appetite for more science fiction in the near future.
May 16, 2024
2.5 Stars
Once the big idea (time can move in different directions) is revealed, some boilerplate SF stuff happens, complete with literal deus ex machina.
The sweet Chris Foss cover is printed badly and off kilter in the usual DAW style.
Once the big idea (time can move in different directions) is revealed, some boilerplate SF stuff happens, complete with literal deus ex machina.
The sweet Chris Foss cover is printed badly and off kilter in the usual DAW style.
January 30, 2025
2025 Book #6:
Collision Course (1973) by Barrington J. Bayley
A book that is more high-concept, politically charged, and better written than it needs to be. Collision Course is set (mostly) on a far-future earth that is now completely ruled by what is essentially a white-supremacist social class (calling themselves the “Titans”). Not only have the Titans expelled all other “undesirable” humans to reservations, they have also come up with a mythology to justify their position of power, a story that foregrounds their struggle against a group of alien invaders in the distant past. But the ruins of this distant alien civilization – as our archaeologist protagonist Rond Heshke notes – seem to be getting newer as time passes. (Perhaps this was the inspiration for the time tombs in Hyperion?) What follows is simultaneously an elaborate exploration of a speculative concept involving time-travel and time-manipulation, and a deconstruction of hierarchical social structures. As a result, conceptual breakthroughs in Collision Course are both technical/scientific (for example, as Heshke realizes that streams of time can flow in various “directions”) as well as social (as Heshke comes to realize the error of the Titans’ ideology of racial supremacy). Admittedly, this novel is overstuffed and chaotically rushed toward the end, and its critique is rather heavy-handed and aimed at an easy target. Also, Bayley’s portrayal of non-white people, while inarguably sympathetic and ostensibly progressive, still sometimes relies on crude 1970s stereotypes, which might be awkward for the contemporary reader. However, I found Collision Course to be an exciting read, no doubt because of the verve of Bayley’s writing and the originality of his approach to time-travel. Bayley’s prose isn’t particularly rich, but it’s confident and perfectly paced. This could have been just another rote space opera, a dumb battle between civilizations across space and time. But Bayley’s commitment to following through on his SF premise elevates Collision Course for me. Recommended. (4/5)
Collision Course (1973) by Barrington J. Bayley
A book that is more high-concept, politically charged, and better written than it needs to be. Collision Course is set (mostly) on a far-future earth that is now completely ruled by what is essentially a white-supremacist social class (calling themselves the “Titans”). Not only have the Titans expelled all other “undesirable” humans to reservations, they have also come up with a mythology to justify their position of power, a story that foregrounds their struggle against a group of alien invaders in the distant past. But the ruins of this distant alien civilization – as our archaeologist protagonist Rond Heshke notes – seem to be getting newer as time passes. (Perhaps this was the inspiration for the time tombs in Hyperion?) What follows is simultaneously an elaborate exploration of a speculative concept involving time-travel and time-manipulation, and a deconstruction of hierarchical social structures. As a result, conceptual breakthroughs in Collision Course are both technical/scientific (for example, as Heshke realizes that streams of time can flow in various “directions”) as well as social (as Heshke comes to realize the error of the Titans’ ideology of racial supremacy). Admittedly, this novel is overstuffed and chaotically rushed toward the end, and its critique is rather heavy-handed and aimed at an easy target. Also, Bayley’s portrayal of non-white people, while inarguably sympathetic and ostensibly progressive, still sometimes relies on crude 1970s stereotypes, which might be awkward for the contemporary reader. However, I found Collision Course to be an exciting read, no doubt because of the verve of Bayley’s writing and the originality of his approach to time-travel. Bayley’s prose isn’t particularly rich, but it’s confident and perfectly paced. This could have been just another rote space opera, a dumb battle between civilizations across space and time. But Bayley’s commitment to following through on his SF premise elevates Collision Course for me. Recommended. (4/5)
August 2, 2017
Collision with Chronos is probably the most novel time travel book I’ve read which immediately makes it at least a little bit special (in the nicest possible way). At the beginning of the book he credits the model of time described in the book to J W Dunne and his books An Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe. However, don’t panic, you don’t need to read these books, Bayley does a perfectly good job of explaining the ideas himself! What is interesting though is how this model effectively removes the ability to manipulate events in the past and so removes most of the paradox problems. But it also introduces various other aspects; all of which contribute to an intriguing story.
The future Earth is ruled by an extremely authoritarian and even more extremely racist government whose authority is enforced by an elite cadre of “Titanium Legions” who ruthlessly subjugate “subspecies” of humans, also referred to as “deviants” or “devs”, isolating them in reservations to preserve the pure blood of “True Man.” Heshke, an archaeologist, whilst investigating alien ruins on a future Earth, discovers anomalies in the manner of their decaying and, after informing the authorities, he is whisked away to assist in the investigation of an alien artefact that seems to indicate these aliens are returning to invade Earth again. But maybe things are not so simple and maybe “again” is not quite the right word to use.
Though I’m sure the dystopian society is an intentional criticism of racism, those aspects of the book that focused on it, and that is a large proportion of the book, were, frankly, not pleasant reading and it made my read of what is a pretty short book by modern standards rather a slog at times. This isn’t really a criticism as racism is never going to be a pleasant subject to read about but that does not make it a subject that should not be addressed in books. The one criticism I would raise on this subject is that Bayley’s handling of it was a little too simplistic; too black and white.
I also had some other more prosaic problems with Collision with Chronos; the characters were pretty two dimensional and women might as well not have existed; they hardly appear in the book at all and, when they do, they hold almost no importance beyond a symbolic one. Okay, it was published in 1973 and attitudes have changed and at least they aren’t presented as nothing more than sex objects but to effectively ignore them completely seemed a little strange. On the other hand Bayley’s world building is superb and the story he builds within this strange universe is both clever and engaging and certainly gave me a view of time that I had never considered before.
On aggregate Collision with Chronos is a very good book but a little heavy handed and somewhat dated. Still well worth a read though and I shall probably try his book The Fall of Chronopolis which seems to be held in higher regard.
The future Earth is ruled by an extremely authoritarian and even more extremely racist government whose authority is enforced by an elite cadre of “Titanium Legions” who ruthlessly subjugate “subspecies” of humans, also referred to as “deviants” or “devs”, isolating them in reservations to preserve the pure blood of “True Man.” Heshke, an archaeologist, whilst investigating alien ruins on a future Earth, discovers anomalies in the manner of their decaying and, after informing the authorities, he is whisked away to assist in the investigation of an alien artefact that seems to indicate these aliens are returning to invade Earth again. But maybe things are not so simple and maybe “again” is not quite the right word to use.
Though I’m sure the dystopian society is an intentional criticism of racism, those aspects of the book that focused on it, and that is a large proportion of the book, were, frankly, not pleasant reading and it made my read of what is a pretty short book by modern standards rather a slog at times. This isn’t really a criticism as racism is never going to be a pleasant subject to read about but that does not make it a subject that should not be addressed in books. The one criticism I would raise on this subject is that Bayley’s handling of it was a little too simplistic; too black and white.
I also had some other more prosaic problems with Collision with Chronos; the characters were pretty two dimensional and women might as well not have existed; they hardly appear in the book at all and, when they do, they hold almost no importance beyond a symbolic one. Okay, it was published in 1973 and attitudes have changed and at least they aren’t presented as nothing more than sex objects but to effectively ignore them completely seemed a little strange. On the other hand Bayley’s world building is superb and the story he builds within this strange universe is both clever and engaging and certainly gave me a view of time that I had never considered before.
On aggregate Collision with Chronos is a very good book but a little heavy handed and somewhat dated. Still well worth a read though and I shall probably try his book The Fall of Chronopolis which seems to be held in higher regard.
July 1, 2020
In the distant future, humanity has colonised the solar system and is able to manipulate time. Earth has become a backwater, having culturally degenerated to a state of fascistic dictatorship. Most of the human race resides within huge interstellar space stations, maintained through a strict class system specifically designed to avoid nepotism. On Earth, variations on the human form have evolved in the radically segregated environments left by a global nuclear war. An eccentric scientist makes the discovery that an entire alien species is traveling backward through time from Earth's future and is on a direct collision course with the human race. Impact will cause the end of all life on Earth!
Collision with Chronos is the third book I've read by Barrington Bayley. He is fast becoming my favourite author. What I love about his stories is their thorough exploration of some truly out-there ideas. This one, like The Fall of Chronopolis, is centred around a conception of time that resists multiverse theories by viewing it as a non-consistent phenomenon produced by the tension between chaos and order. In an afterword, Bayley attributes this idea to J W Dunne. J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis have also made use of this theory. Barrington's usage is more direct, and much more clearly explained. He uses it as a vehicle for a climactic plot and narrative structure that in places becomes somewhat disorientating.
There are some decidedly psychedelic moments as the two time frames converge but Bayley keeps his prose clear and descriptions succinct. The pace is good throughout, and the key theme of racism is addressed unflinchingly. The white supremacism of the Nazistic Earthlings is lampooned throughout and there are many moments of gentle humour as both they and the hedonistic space-faring humans presume their own superiority over the other. These moments are welcome because overall Collision with Chronos is a fairly ominous read, dealing as it does with humanity's capacity for inflicting injury and subjugation upon itself.
World War II and the holocaust lie in the background and clearly Bayley is making earnest calls for compassion and tolerance in a world that had recently stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. That is not to say that this novel is a po-faced diatribe. Quite the opposite. I found it to be a thrill ride of the just-can't-put-it-down variety. Bayley writes beautifully. His sentences are flowing and his vocabulary is vastly extensive. But he is not a show off. Substance always takes priority over style, story over theme. His novels are intellectual without being pretentious. His voice is unique and I think I'm addicted to it.
Collision with Chronos is the third book I've read by Barrington Bayley. He is fast becoming my favourite author. What I love about his stories is their thorough exploration of some truly out-there ideas. This one, like The Fall of Chronopolis, is centred around a conception of time that resists multiverse theories by viewing it as a non-consistent phenomenon produced by the tension between chaos and order. In an afterword, Bayley attributes this idea to J W Dunne. J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis have also made use of this theory. Barrington's usage is more direct, and much more clearly explained. He uses it as a vehicle for a climactic plot and narrative structure that in places becomes somewhat disorientating.
There are some decidedly psychedelic moments as the two time frames converge but Bayley keeps his prose clear and descriptions succinct. The pace is good throughout, and the key theme of racism is addressed unflinchingly. The white supremacism of the Nazistic Earthlings is lampooned throughout and there are many moments of gentle humour as both they and the hedonistic space-faring humans presume their own superiority over the other. These moments are welcome because overall Collision with Chronos is a fairly ominous read, dealing as it does with humanity's capacity for inflicting injury and subjugation upon itself.
World War II and the holocaust lie in the background and clearly Bayley is making earnest calls for compassion and tolerance in a world that had recently stood on the brink of nuclear annihilation. That is not to say that this novel is a po-faced diatribe. Quite the opposite. I found it to be a thrill ride of the just-can't-put-it-down variety. Bayley writes beautifully. His sentences are flowing and his vocabulary is vastly extensive. But he is not a show off. Substance always takes priority over style, story over theme. His novels are intellectual without being pretentious. His voice is unique and I think I'm addicted to it.
October 5, 2023
This dates from 1973. I read it in 1980 (that's the date I've written in my paperback copy) and I remember it mostly as being an interesting take on time travel, based on real scientific ideas. There's also a twist on an idea covered by Star Trek - and later Stargate SG1 - of a divided society where an upper elite is free to study science or the arts while a.lower class does all the work of production and maintenance.
Reading it in 2023, I see that it's a scathing criticism of racism and the stupidity of pursuing ideology to its extreme ends, even when scientific discoveries are telling the leaders they are completely wrong. This all feels very familiar somehow, even if we're not yet living in a dystopia.
I was expecting the book to feel more dated than it does. It's set in our future, possibly a long way in our future, but there's been at least one cataclysmic war, so technological development has been patchy, in some ways more advanced than ours, in other ways less so. The white race has gained universal supremacy and believes the other races are the result of mutations. You get some way into the story before you start to realise that the deviants are probably just people with ordinary but non- white ethnic characteristics. Racial purity has become a religion, a fanatical one and ultimately leads to the downfall of earth's leaders. The author is British and would have been growing up during World War II. You can see where he got some of his inspiration.
As might be expected from a novel of this era, the characters aren't as well developed as we've come to expect, and nearly all are male. There are no women playing an active role. And some of the language used to describe the 'deviants ' is shocking, but stay with it, the ultimate end of this book is to demonstrate we are equal and need each other. There's aliens too.
Reading it in 2023, I see that it's a scathing criticism of racism and the stupidity of pursuing ideology to its extreme ends, even when scientific discoveries are telling the leaders they are completely wrong. This all feels very familiar somehow, even if we're not yet living in a dystopia.
I was expecting the book to feel more dated than it does. It's set in our future, possibly a long way in our future, but there's been at least one cataclysmic war, so technological development has been patchy, in some ways more advanced than ours, in other ways less so. The white race has gained universal supremacy and believes the other races are the result of mutations. You get some way into the story before you start to realise that the deviants are probably just people with ordinary but non- white ethnic characteristics. Racial purity has become a religion, a fanatical one and ultimately leads to the downfall of earth's leaders. The author is British and would have been growing up during World War II. You can see where he got some of his inspiration.
As might be expected from a novel of this era, the characters aren't as well developed as we've come to expect, and nearly all are male. There are no women playing an active role. And some of the language used to describe the 'deviants ' is shocking, but stay with it, the ultimate end of this book is to demonstrate we are equal and need each other. There's aliens too.
September 4, 2017
This book has a couple of interesting SF ideas, but they never really go anywhere. The characters are bland and forgettable. The factions are, without exception, impossible to root for. They're either hateful and violent (titans and the reverse-time aliens) or passive and dumb (the dev and the chinese-in-space). Of course there's also the entity, whatever it was called, which just acted as a deus ex machina and conveniently solved the unsolvable problem and provided the poor little dev, who couldn't be bothered to even try to help themselves, with a happy end.
Meh. I'm not even sure what the underlying message was supposed to be. "Racism is bad" maybe? Or "fighting back against evil is futile"?
Meh. I'm not even sure what the underlying message was supposed to be. "Racism is bad" maybe? Or "fighting back against evil is futile"?
March 1, 2020
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
Barrington J. Bayley’s Collision Course (Collision with Chronos) (1973) is based on a fascinating hard sci-fi premise, the intersection of two time waves, one from the future heading into the past, and the “present”, heading into the future. In short, there are two “presents” moving towards each other with the possibility of annihilation.
Of course, Barrington J. Bayley has to explain these complicated paradoxes and actually comes up with an interesting if somewhat hokey (but original) theory. The “now” band of time is but a side effect of the universe and not [...].
Barrington J. Bayley’s Collision Course (Collision with Chronos) (1973) is based on a fascinating hard sci-fi premise, the intersection of two time waves, one from the future heading into the past, and the “present”, heading into the future. In short, there are two “presents” moving towards each other with the possibility of annihilation.
Of course, Barrington J. Bayley has to explain these complicated paradoxes and actually comes up with an interesting if somewhat hokey (but original) theory. The “now” band of time is but a side effect of the universe and not [...].
February 12, 2020
I give some points for “weird” but I take them back for “incoherent.”
September 29, 2022
Wyobraźnia Bayleya wzbudza podziw. Jego pomysły na technologię przyszłości, bardzo oryginalne. Jest to jedna z tych książek, które będzie czytać się z ciekawością pomimo upływu lat.
December 28, 2023
Mieszane uczucia, chwilami bardzo ciekawe, chwilami trochę zbyt łopatologiczne nawiązania do ziemskiej historii, wybijało mnie to z narracji. Chętnie kiedyś wrócę, to krótka książka, ale gęsta.
March 13, 2015
I was looking over a list of Seiun Award winners (that's the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Awards) when I noticed something odd on the list of best translated novels:
Okay, that's a pretty good list of the major figures of sci-fi, leaning a bit more towards hard-SF than the Hugo Awards do and being light on female authors ... but, who the hell is this Barrington J. Bayley guy? I mean, the Japanese must really love him. They've given him more awards than anyone but Robert J. Sawyer.
Well, Wikipedia to the rescue. Turns out he was a new wave author who influenced Bruce Sterling and Alastair Reynolds. Huh, I love those guys. Better check Bayley out.
Luckily his works are available in reasonably priced ebooks.
And yes, I can definitely see the influence on Reynolds. The opening scene in Revelation Space is remarkably similar to a scene early in this book, and the climactic battle is very much in Reynold's style, with all the fighting taking place off screen while the characters deal with the intellectual issue at the heart of the story.
Too bad it all gets wrapped up with a deus ex machina.
I can also see why the Japanese like this. It has a lot in common with sci-fi anime -- villains who, despite being monstrously evil, are still presented as acting within their own moral framework (think of the House of Zabi from Mobile Suit Gundam), and the deus ex machina is one of those philosophical conversations that take place in a vaguely defined and surrealistic floaty place (the end of Madoka, the end of Penguindrum, the end of Mospeada, the end of Akira, etc., etc.).
1970 The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard
1971 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
1972 Nightwings by Robert Silverberg
1973 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1974 Dune by Frank Herbert
1975 Up the Line by Robert Silverberg
1976 ...And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny
1977 The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance
1978 I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein
1979 Ringworld by Larry Niven
1980 Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
1981 Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan
1982 The Genesis Machine by James P. Hogan
1983 Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
1984 The Garments of Caean by Barrington J. Bayley
1985 The Zen Gun by Barrington J. Bayley
1986 Elric saga by Michael Moorcock
1987 Neuromancer by William Gibson
1988 Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith
1989 Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
1990 Collision with Chronos by Barrington J. Bayley
1991 The Uplift War by David Brin
1992 The McAndrew Chronicles by Charles Sheffield
1993 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
1994 Entoverse by James P. Hogan
1996 The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Timelike Infinity by Stephen Baxter
1997 End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer
1998 Fallen Angels by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
1999 The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
2000 Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick
2001 Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer
2002 There and Back Again by Pat Murphy
2003 Illegal Alien by Robert J. Sawyer
2004 Heaven's Reach by David Brin
2005 Distress by Greg Egan
2006 Diaspora by Greg Egan
2007 Mortal Engines by Phillip Reeve
2008 Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, Jr.
2009 Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
2010 The Last Colony by John Scalzi
2011 Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
2012 The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
2013 The Android's Dream by John Scalzi
2014 Blindsight by Peter Watts
Okay, that's a pretty good list of the major figures of sci-fi, leaning a bit more towards hard-SF than the Hugo Awards do and being light on female authors ... but, who the hell is this Barrington J. Bayley guy? I mean, the Japanese must really love him. They've given him more awards than anyone but Robert J. Sawyer.
Well, Wikipedia to the rescue. Turns out he was a new wave author who influenced Bruce Sterling and Alastair Reynolds. Huh, I love those guys. Better check Bayley out.
Luckily his works are available in reasonably priced ebooks.
And yes, I can definitely see the influence on Reynolds. The opening scene in Revelation Space is remarkably similar to a scene early in this book, and the climactic battle is very much in Reynold's style, with all the fighting taking place off screen while the characters deal with the intellectual issue at the heart of the story.
Too bad it all gets wrapped up with a deus ex machina.
I can also see why the Japanese like this. It has a lot in common with sci-fi anime -- villains who, despite being monstrously evil, are still presented as acting within their own moral framework (think of the House of Zabi from Mobile Suit Gundam), and the deus ex machina is one of those philosophical conversations that take place in a vaguely defined and surrealistic floaty place (the end of Madoka, the end of Penguindrum, the end of Mospeada, the end of Akira, etc., etc.).
September 4, 2025
(6 July, 2023)
Great idea and wonderful ending. There is a bit of very ordinary storytelling in the middle but, overall, this is a good time travel tale. Contained herein are some ideas on the nature of time which are freaking mind-melting: conscious time, three dimensional time, oblique time - whoa!
The Earth is controlled by a domineering elite, the Titans, one with ideas of racial purity and an overtly aggressive mindset. They stumble upon a huge discovery, freak-out and decide blunt force is the answer: an observation on the time of this novel's original publication and, sadly but predictively, our own. Out of the blue, 'saviours' arrive but they are as fucked up as the Titans. The outcome is unique, to say the least, then we are left with a commentary on our nature and on how we might never change.
The racism of future humans is almost comforting, as in it's great to know we remain as clueless as we are today (er... in general terms of course). Some aspects of the story make no sense or are not explained adequately (exempli gratia; which set of grandparents get the grandchild? How does time differentiate living and inert entities?). This is also peopled by barely fleshed out characters, this is such a small book would it have hurt much to add a few more details to their lives? The author also drops the reverse 'others' way too fast and, lastly... where are the women?!?
The ending, with humans still not able to rise above their violent tendencies, is depressing... and an all-too-true reflection of us now. The message? Humans suck! We'll always be petty, stupid and obliviously content with it all. Yep!
Great idea and wonderful ending. There is a bit of very ordinary storytelling in the middle but, overall, this is a good time travel tale. Contained herein are some ideas on the nature of time which are freaking mind-melting: conscious time, three dimensional time, oblique time - whoa!
The Earth is controlled by a domineering elite, the Titans, one with ideas of racial purity and an overtly aggressive mindset. They stumble upon a huge discovery, freak-out and decide blunt force is the answer: an observation on the time of this novel's original publication and, sadly but predictively, our own. Out of the blue, 'saviours' arrive but they are as fucked up as the Titans. The outcome is unique, to say the least, then we are left with a commentary on our nature and on how we might never change.
The racism of future humans is almost comforting, as in it's great to know we remain as clueless as we are today (er... in general terms of course). Some aspects of the story make no sense or are not explained adequately (exempli gratia; which set of grandparents get the grandchild? How does time differentiate living and inert entities?). This is also peopled by barely fleshed out characters, this is such a small book would it have hurt much to add a few more details to their lives? The author also drops the reverse 'others' way too fast and, lastly... where are the women?!?
The ending, with humans still not able to rise above their violent tendencies, is depressing... and an all-too-true reflection of us now. The message? Humans suck! We'll always be petty, stupid and obliviously content with it all. Yep!
July 5, 2025
An excellent little novel that plays with the concept of time. In an unspecified future, Earth is ruled by white supremacists (Titanium Legions) while deviant sub-races (devs) are relegated to reservations. The Legion is obsessed with racial purity and blames an alien civilization for the hardships of True Men. The ruins of this alien civilization are scattered across the Earth, and the Legion is trying to uncover the alien secrets to insure a defense against a future alien intervention. Written today, this book would certainly have been 2 - 4 times longer, if not an actual series. Bayley's works deserve rediscovery, and this book is great fun!
September 5, 2015
La fine del tempo sulla terra.
“Rotta di collisione”, del recentemente scomparso Barrington J. Bayley (1937-2008), è uno dei vecchi romanzi della serie Cosmo (1978, v.o. 1973) che mi strizzavano l’occhio dalle bancarelle in fiera durante il Salone del Libro Usato di Milano dello scorso dicembre.
Ancora una volta, a farla da padrone in questa storia è il Tempo. Continua a leggere qui:
http://fantascienzaedintorni.blogspot...
“Rotta di collisione”, del recentemente scomparso Barrington J. Bayley (1937-2008), è uno dei vecchi romanzi della serie Cosmo (1978, v.o. 1973) che mi strizzavano l’occhio dalle bancarelle in fiera durante il Salone del Libro Usato di Milano dello scorso dicembre.
Ancora una volta, a farla da padrone in questa storia è il Tempo. Continua a leggere qui:
http://fantascienzaedintorni.blogspot...
August 9, 2008
Imagine an Earth ruled by a Fascist regime whose primary goal is racial purity. Now it finds itself being invaded from the other side of the time-stream. That’s the premise of Barrington Bayley’s novel Collision Course.
http://fireandsword.blogspot.com/2007...
http://fireandsword.blogspot.com/2007...
March 28, 2010
Barrington Bayley packs more into under two hundred pages than most authors come up with in a lifetime. The plot is barely functional and the characters are there just because it's hard to sell a novel unless it has some characters, but the imagination on display is breathtaking.
June 18, 2012
Bayley always has interesting ideas. They rarely conform to the accepted tropes of science fiction, which makes them fun to read. His craftsmanship (characters, plot, style) is good but not outstanding.
Read
August 23, 2008isbn,original
December 12, 2009
More sheer nutsiness from Bayley. He cracks me up.
June 26, 2016
My copy is entitled Collision Course but Wikipedia says it's the same book.
March 30, 2017
Review Barrington J Bayley's Collision Course
I first read Barrington J. Bayley's Collision Course/Collision with Chronos more than thirty years ago. I must have given my first copy to the Goodwill. I searched for years before finding my current copy at Haslam's Books in St. Petersburg, Florida. They are the best. Collision Course is the sort of story you want to not lose.
Bailey follows a fairly unique approach to time travel stories. The vast majority deal with an alterable timeline that must either be changed or preserved to save the viewpoint character's way of life, the universe, etc; or with a multiverse where myriads of ways unfold and what ever decision a character might make, other versions of that character are deciding to do the same thing or its opposite. One example of the former is Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. There are many examples in Star Trek with its time loops and Predestination Paradoxes and Chiefs O'Brien averring their hatred for Temporal Mechanics. Larry Niven's All the Myriad Ways is an example of the latter. Catch that Zeppelin by Fritz Lieber and Joe Haldeman's Manifest Destiny offer alternate time lines within a multiverse. Another approach, my personal favorite, is that you can't change the past. This the premise of By the Time We got to Gaugamela by R Garcia y Robertson. You can go back, but whatever is about to happen has already happened. To paraphrase, all the history books agree that Alexander the Great is going to be alive tomorrow, but no such assurances are available for the time traveller in question. Bailey takes a totally different tack from any of these, one ""so original that it avoids all (most?) time-travel clichés".
According to The Newsletter of the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic, Bailey followed the ideas of J. W. Dunne set forth in An Experiment with Time. Time travels as a wave or a torrent through six dimensional space in a local region of what we perceive as three dimensional space, creating and carrying life and consciousness with it as side effects. The future is dead and decayed, the past dead-- a collection of insensate automatons. You can build a machine to carry a bit of time with you ahead of or behind the time wave, but it won't do you any good. Times finger, having writ, moves on and you cannot change a word, act or dead. The trouble comes when two different time streams are headed along the same planet in opposite directions, like a pair of locomotives rushing along a track on a collision course set to arrive at a fatal destination. Life-consciousness-intelligence, it cannot be over emphasized, are byproducts of the time stream/wave/torrent.
And so it is in Collision Course that two time streams associated with Earth will crash together in about 200 years, with serious effects noticeable in about 100 years. Collisions of this nature must occur with some frequency as the International Space Society Retort City, located many light years from Earth and populated by the descendants of Chinese emigrees, has recently had a near miss with an entity whose time stream is situated obliquely to that of Retort City. The inhabitants of Earth are just beginning to understand time travel. The inhabitants of Retort City can literally run rings around the Earthers, and the Oblique Entity has nearly godlike (not Godlike as it points out) powers. The abilities of Retort City's scientists and the Oblique Entity, combined with obliqueness of their paths, allowed them to avert total disaster. Even so, things got pretty bad. The Oblique Entity and a researcher on Retort City have been watching events on Earth unfold with detached insouciance and mild concern. Time travellers from Retort City rescue stranded time travellers from Earth and offer to help.
Matters are not so straight forward at this point as one might hope. ISS Retort City was established 5000 years before the setting of the story, which is many thousands of years ahead of our own time. The races of man on Earth bare little physical resemblance to the people of our times (the "Chinks" of Retort City are a legendary race on Earth). The dominant race on Earth, led by the Titanium Legions (think SS), follows an Earth Mother religion. They believe with all the fervor that religious conviction can bring that they, True Man, are Earth's true sons and all the other races are defiling deviants whom they must expunge. There are archaeological ruins of alien design scattered about they believe support these beliefs.
The Titans see these ruins as proof of Alien Interventionalists who diabolically caused the rise of the Deviant races to destroy True Man. Never mind that there had been nuclear wars in the past with radioactive fallout to increase background radiation levels and thereby raise the mutation rate and never mind that the new races arose isolated from one another for a long time. Natural selection and niche filling divergence don't fit their self image or self interests. Or their self serving propaganda. Genocide is something the Titans have been quite successful at with only a few remnants of the other races remaining on reservations. The Titans have roving "experts" that can tell at a glance if someone is "racially impure". There is of course opposition and an underground which is losing faster each day. When the Titans learn of the ISS, with its wondrous technology and mighty industrial capacity, the natural recourse is to mount an invasion.
Retort City is designed as a double retort with the retorts set end to end. Lower Retort/Production Retort is devoted to industry and production. The mastery of time is so complete that different sections of a ping pong table can have different time streams moving at separate rates. Production lines can be run through time loops so that an artefact that was months in the making can be available hours after being ordered. The two halves are offset by about 34 years, so direct travel between the two halves is futile. Manufactured goods travel along a time gradient to the other half of the city and always arrive just in time. So great is Production Retort's efficiencies that it has greater industrial capacity than all of earth. The workers there are wholly devoted to their work. Their absorption with work is so great that off duty conversation often centers on how and where work is going. To them any other way of life would be a waste. "Technology was, after all, their life."(pg 54)
Life within Upper Retort/Leisure Retort is more luxurious, more devoted to subtle esthetics, and "was probably the most refined culture the galaxy had to offer". (pg 57) It's inhabitants are wholly absorbed in advancing the arts and sciences, so absorbed that they tend to objectify people and ignore any human factor not connected with the research that holds their attention. (So self absorbed that the sounds of fighting with the Titanium Legions is less a survival threat than an annoying distraction.) Little physical labor is performed directly, there being machines to handle that sort of thing. The apparent social disparity between the two halves of Retort City is solved by their mastery of time. Envy is avoided by the Exchange of Generations. One sends one's children by way of a temporal differential tunnel to the opposite half of Retort City and receives one's grandchildren in return. Robert Gibson hits the nail firmly when he says the equanimity of the arrangement eliminates jealousy between Retort City's two halves. The Leisure Retort's inhabitants are not so self absorbed as to not offer to help the inhabitants of Earth deal with the impending collision.
Once again, nothing is easy. An evacuation of refugees is impractical on religious grounds. The Titan dominated society could never abandon Mother Earth. It is unfeasible logistically as not Retort City lacks the lift capability. Diverting the time streams is beyond their science. They are not sufficient to the task and must ask the Oblique Entity for its help-- a sort of deus ex machina.
Aliens are described in some stories as being too alien to comprehend. Most human motivations/conflicts begin with food safety and shelter and proceed along Maslow's hierarchy to greed status fulfilment and pleasure seeking. Niven's Kzini are motivated by status and the desire to acquire estates on which to hunt and raise families. The alien empires in Star Trek seem involved in dominance games characteristic of humans. I don't recall hearing an explanation for the behavior of the aliens in Independence Day unless it was pure revulsion. Certainly hatred was evident. All understandable as human like. The Oblique Entity may be beyond human comprehension by nature. No human definition fits and description is based only on vague and fleeting perceptions. No words suffice for it to explain its nature to humans. One common trait comes through clearly-- the enjoyment of entertainment. One of the human time travelers implores its assistance in saving the Earth. How does one obtain aid from someone who finds great entertainment value in the unfolding drama of one's plight?
For that matter, how does one convince someone that their murderous hatred is misplaced and futile? The Titans and the lemur like creatures in the approaching time wave ignore the fact that consciousness/life/intelligence are but byproducts of time. Even if one group succeeds in exterminating the other, the 2 time waves will still crash together ending time and life. (It is a theme of the story that despots and tyrants and haters ignore any information that contradicts their dogma and preconceived notions.) Effort and time that would be better spent working together for mutual survival are wasted on hydrogen bombs and plague weapons. As the Oblique Entity says, the final Battle of Armageddon must be fought.
Collision Course is tightly written, fast paced story that wants to be read all the way through without a break. As one reviewer puts it, "Bayley packs more into under two hundred pages than most authors come up with in a lifetime". The characters are sketched in quickly, but you know them as well as need be to follow the plot. The unique approach to time travel and the unique solution to the class struggle make it well worth reading. The ending of the story is fitting as the major conflict is resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned, even if they don't all know it. It is not a sugar coated resolution and conclusion, but the Titans would not have had it any other way, "with their cargos of death, death, and more death." I first read the story when I was in my late teens and then reread it some 30 years later. I enjoyed it as much this time as I did the first time. It is not currently available as e-text, but there are paper copies still available.
Selected dramatis personae:
•Leard Ascar- Earth's leading time scientist
•Chairman of Panhumanic League
• Grandfather of Hue Su Mueng
• Herrick- Amhrak scientist inventor of remote, intferometry-based remote viewing
• Rond Heshke- prominent archeologist
• Hue Su Mueng- disgruntled Retort City malcontent
• Hueh Shao father of Hue Su Mueng
• Hwen Wu- Leisure Retort prime minister and old friend of Hueh Shao
• Layella- Sobrie's "racially impure" girlfriend
• Leader Limnich- leader of Titanium Legions and de facto ruler of Earth
• Li Kim- friend of Hue Su Mueng
• Li Li San- Retort City envoys to future Earth aliens
• Blare Oblomot- assistant to Rond Heske at Hathar Ruins. brother of Sobrie. member of Panhumanic League
• Sobrie Oblomot- member of Panhumanic League
• Shiu Kung Chien- Retort City's leading expert on time. in contact with the Oblique Entity.
• Titan-Lieutenant Gann- time travel tech officer
• Titan-Lieutenant Hosk- time travel tech officer
• Titan-Captain Brask
• Titan-Major Brourne
• Whang Yat-Sen Retort City envoy to future Earth aliens
��
Further reading about Barrington J. Bayley, Collision Course/Collision with Chronos • COLLISION WITH CHRONOS on Ovias
• Astounding Worlds of Barrington J Bayley on Ovias
• Review of Collision Course on Science Fiction Ruminations
• Wryte Stuff-- Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions
• Jesse's Review on Goodreads
• Barrington J Bayley on Wikipedia
• Barrington J Bayley # ISFDB
• Barrington J. Bayley: Science-fiction writer who treated the human condition as a puzzle that must be solved
• Book Review: The Fall of Chronopolis, Barrington J. Bayley (1974)
• Book Review: Star Winds, Barrington J. Bayley (1978)
• Book Review: Empire of Two Worlds, Barrington J. Bayley (1972)
• The Zen Gun-Barrington J. Bayley (1983)
• Review: Let the Galaxy Burn - Warhammer 40k Anthology
• Obituary: Barrington J. Bayley
• Barrington John Bayley on Fantastic Fiction
I first read Barrington J. Bayley's Collision Course/Collision with Chronos more than thirty years ago. I must have given my first copy to the Goodwill. I searched for years before finding my current copy at Haslam's Books in St. Petersburg, Florida. They are the best. Collision Course is the sort of story you want to not lose.
Bailey follows a fairly unique approach to time travel stories. The vast majority deal with an alterable timeline that must either be changed or preserved to save the viewpoint character's way of life, the universe, etc; or with a multiverse where myriads of ways unfold and what ever decision a character might make, other versions of that character are deciding to do the same thing or its opposite. One example of the former is Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. There are many examples in Star Trek with its time loops and Predestination Paradoxes and Chiefs O'Brien averring their hatred for Temporal Mechanics. Larry Niven's All the Myriad Ways is an example of the latter. Catch that Zeppelin by Fritz Lieber and Joe Haldeman's Manifest Destiny offer alternate time lines within a multiverse. Another approach, my personal favorite, is that you can't change the past. This the premise of By the Time We got to Gaugamela by R Garcia y Robertson. You can go back, but whatever is about to happen has already happened. To paraphrase, all the history books agree that Alexander the Great is going to be alive tomorrow, but no such assurances are available for the time traveller in question. Bailey takes a totally different tack from any of these, one ""so original that it avoids all (most?) time-travel clichés".
According to The Newsletter of the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic, Bailey followed the ideas of J. W. Dunne set forth in An Experiment with Time. Time travels as a wave or a torrent through six dimensional space in a local region of what we perceive as three dimensional space, creating and carrying life and consciousness with it as side effects. The future is dead and decayed, the past dead-- a collection of insensate automatons. You can build a machine to carry a bit of time with you ahead of or behind the time wave, but it won't do you any good. Times finger, having writ, moves on and you cannot change a word, act or dead. The trouble comes when two different time streams are headed along the same planet in opposite directions, like a pair of locomotives rushing along a track on a collision course set to arrive at a fatal destination. Life-consciousness-intelligence, it cannot be over emphasized, are byproducts of the time stream/wave/torrent.
And so it is in Collision Course that two time streams associated with Earth will crash together in about 200 years, with serious effects noticeable in about 100 years. Collisions of this nature must occur with some frequency as the International Space Society Retort City, located many light years from Earth and populated by the descendants of Chinese emigrees, has recently had a near miss with an entity whose time stream is situated obliquely to that of Retort City. The inhabitants of Earth are just beginning to understand time travel. The inhabitants of Retort City can literally run rings around the Earthers, and the Oblique Entity has nearly godlike (not Godlike as it points out) powers. The abilities of Retort City's scientists and the Oblique Entity, combined with obliqueness of their paths, allowed them to avert total disaster. Even so, things got pretty bad. The Oblique Entity and a researcher on Retort City have been watching events on Earth unfold with detached insouciance and mild concern. Time travellers from Retort City rescue stranded time travellers from Earth and offer to help.
Matters are not so straight forward at this point as one might hope. ISS Retort City was established 5000 years before the setting of the story, which is many thousands of years ahead of our own time. The races of man on Earth bare little physical resemblance to the people of our times (the "Chinks" of Retort City are a legendary race on Earth). The dominant race on Earth, led by the Titanium Legions (think SS), follows an Earth Mother religion. They believe with all the fervor that religious conviction can bring that they, True Man, are Earth's true sons and all the other races are defiling deviants whom they must expunge. There are archaeological ruins of alien design scattered about they believe support these beliefs.
The Titans see these ruins as proof of Alien Interventionalists who diabolically caused the rise of the Deviant races to destroy True Man. Never mind that there had been nuclear wars in the past with radioactive fallout to increase background radiation levels and thereby raise the mutation rate and never mind that the new races arose isolated from one another for a long time. Natural selection and niche filling divergence don't fit their self image or self interests. Or their self serving propaganda. Genocide is something the Titans have been quite successful at with only a few remnants of the other races remaining on reservations. The Titans have roving "experts" that can tell at a glance if someone is "racially impure". There is of course opposition and an underground which is losing faster each day. When the Titans learn of the ISS, with its wondrous technology and mighty industrial capacity, the natural recourse is to mount an invasion.
Retort City is designed as a double retort with the retorts set end to end. Lower Retort/Production Retort is devoted to industry and production. The mastery of time is so complete that different sections of a ping pong table can have different time streams moving at separate rates. Production lines can be run through time loops so that an artefact that was months in the making can be available hours after being ordered. The two halves are offset by about 34 years, so direct travel between the two halves is futile. Manufactured goods travel along a time gradient to the other half of the city and always arrive just in time. So great is Production Retort's efficiencies that it has greater industrial capacity than all of earth. The workers there are wholly devoted to their work. Their absorption with work is so great that off duty conversation often centers on how and where work is going. To them any other way of life would be a waste. "Technology was, after all, their life."(pg 54)
Life within Upper Retort/Leisure Retort is more luxurious, more devoted to subtle esthetics, and "was probably the most refined culture the galaxy had to offer". (pg 57) It's inhabitants are wholly absorbed in advancing the arts and sciences, so absorbed that they tend to objectify people and ignore any human factor not connected with the research that holds their attention. (So self absorbed that the sounds of fighting with the Titanium Legions is less a survival threat than an annoying distraction.) Little physical labor is performed directly, there being machines to handle that sort of thing. The apparent social disparity between the two halves of Retort City is solved by their mastery of time. Envy is avoided by the Exchange of Generations. One sends one's children by way of a temporal differential tunnel to the opposite half of Retort City and receives one's grandchildren in return. Robert Gibson hits the nail firmly when he says the equanimity of the arrangement eliminates jealousy between Retort City's two halves. The Leisure Retort's inhabitants are not so self absorbed as to not offer to help the inhabitants of Earth deal with the impending collision.
Once again, nothing is easy. An evacuation of refugees is impractical on religious grounds. The Titan dominated society could never abandon Mother Earth. It is unfeasible logistically as not Retort City lacks the lift capability. Diverting the time streams is beyond their science. They are not sufficient to the task and must ask the Oblique Entity for its help-- a sort of deus ex machina.
Aliens are described in some stories as being too alien to comprehend. Most human motivations/conflicts begin with food safety and shelter and proceed along Maslow's hierarchy to greed status fulfilment and pleasure seeking. Niven's Kzini are motivated by status and the desire to acquire estates on which to hunt and raise families. The alien empires in Star Trek seem involved in dominance games characteristic of humans. I don't recall hearing an explanation for the behavior of the aliens in Independence Day unless it was pure revulsion. Certainly hatred was evident. All understandable as human like. The Oblique Entity may be beyond human comprehension by nature. No human definition fits and description is based only on vague and fleeting perceptions. No words suffice for it to explain its nature to humans. One common trait comes through clearly-- the enjoyment of entertainment. One of the human time travelers implores its assistance in saving the Earth. How does one obtain aid from someone who finds great entertainment value in the unfolding drama of one's plight?
For that matter, how does one convince someone that their murderous hatred is misplaced and futile? The Titans and the lemur like creatures in the approaching time wave ignore the fact that consciousness/life/intelligence are but byproducts of time. Even if one group succeeds in exterminating the other, the 2 time waves will still crash together ending time and life. (It is a theme of the story that despots and tyrants and haters ignore any information that contradicts their dogma and preconceived notions.) Effort and time that would be better spent working together for mutual survival are wasted on hydrogen bombs and plague weapons. As the Oblique Entity says, the final Battle of Armageddon must be fought.
Collision Course is tightly written, fast paced story that wants to be read all the way through without a break. As one reviewer puts it, "Bayley packs more into under two hundred pages than most authors come up with in a lifetime". The characters are sketched in quickly, but you know them as well as need be to follow the plot. The unique approach to time travel and the unique solution to the class struggle make it well worth reading. The ending of the story is fitting as the major conflict is resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned, even if they don't all know it. It is not a sugar coated resolution and conclusion, but the Titans would not have had it any other way, "with their cargos of death, death, and more death." I first read the story when I was in my late teens and then reread it some 30 years later. I enjoyed it as much this time as I did the first time. It is not currently available as e-text, but there are paper copies still available.
Selected dramatis personae:
•Leard Ascar- Earth's leading time scientist
•Chairman of Panhumanic League
• Grandfather of Hue Su Mueng
• Herrick- Amhrak scientist inventor of remote, intferometry-based remote viewing
• Rond Heshke- prominent archeologist
• Hue Su Mueng- disgruntled Retort City malcontent
• Hueh Shao father of Hue Su Mueng
• Hwen Wu- Leisure Retort prime minister and old friend of Hueh Shao
• Layella- Sobrie's "racially impure" girlfriend
• Leader Limnich- leader of Titanium Legions and de facto ruler of Earth
• Li Kim- friend of Hue Su Mueng
• Li Li San- Retort City envoys to future Earth aliens
• Blare Oblomot- assistant to Rond Heske at Hathar Ruins. brother of Sobrie. member of Panhumanic League
• Sobrie Oblomot- member of Panhumanic League
• Shiu Kung Chien- Retort City's leading expert on time. in contact with the Oblique Entity.
• Titan-Lieutenant Gann- time travel tech officer
• Titan-Lieutenant Hosk- time travel tech officer
• Titan-Captain Brask
• Titan-Major Brourne
• Whang Yat-Sen Retort City envoy to future Earth aliens
��
Further reading about Barrington J. Bayley, Collision Course/Collision with Chronos • COLLISION WITH CHRONOS on Ovias
• Astounding Worlds of Barrington J Bayley on Ovias
• Review of Collision Course on Science Fiction Ruminations
• Wryte Stuff-- Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions
• Jesse's Review on Goodreads
• Barrington J Bayley on Wikipedia
• Barrington J Bayley # ISFDB
• Barrington J. Bayley: Science-fiction writer who treated the human condition as a puzzle that must be solved
• Book Review: The Fall of Chronopolis, Barrington J. Bayley (1974)
• Book Review: Star Winds, Barrington J. Bayley (1978)
• Book Review: Empire of Two Worlds, Barrington J. Bayley (1972)
• The Zen Gun-Barrington J. Bayley (1983)
• Review: Let the Galaxy Burn - Warhammer 40k Anthology
• Obituary: Barrington J. Bayley
• Barrington John Bayley on Fantastic Fiction
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews