Highwood

Neal Barrett, Jr. Highwood (1972)
Internet research has revealed to me that Neal Barrett, Jr. had a reasonably respectable career as a writer following this early effort and - of more direct interest to me - was born in San Antonio; so I was well disposed towards this as I turned to the first page, or at least curious or hopeful or something. It came stuck to Barrington Bayley's arse as part of an Ace Double, and gets off to a tremendous start.

Highwood is a relative of Aldiss's Hothouse, or maybe something from Ursula LeGuin, or Ewok soft porn at the less complimentary end of the scale. It's set on a world where the trees are tens of miles high and home to entire communities of lesbian natives resembling lemurs. The males live in a separate segregated community, either in another tree or miles down on the forest floor - the author seems a bit vague about the details. Kearney Wynn comes to this world to study these natives and immediately finds herself at odds with Hamby Flagg, who seems to be some sort of colonial caretaker stationed on this peculiar world. Hamby is accompanied by Teddi, a robotic teddy bear who provides the counselling and emotional support necessitated by such a thankless and solitary posting. Of all the novels which have ever reminded me of Philip K. Dick, this one reminds me of Philip K. Dick a lot, at least up until the last couple of chapters - and in a good way, writing with the same sort of rhythm - expressive without getting too fancy - and characters who could easily be on vacation from Ubik or A Maze of Death or one of the others.

However, Highwood seems often wilfully vague in what it's trying to describe, and I made it right to the end without quite working out what had happened to the colony of male natives seen earlier, or - honestly - what the fuck was going on; and before it gets resolved, the author whips off the mask and reveals that we've actually been reading a very different book, one which seems to promise a lot but turns out to be ham-fisted bollocks. That lesbian Ewok colony was actually some sort of metaphor for women's emancipation, which Kearney realises is all a waste of time, and she only ever thought otherwise due to having had some funny ideas in her head - probably all that book learnin'.

She stepped back from him, thrust her fists stubbornly against her hips. 'No—you listen to me, Hamby Flagg. I didn't climb all over this damn planet and half a dozen others for my health—or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, moth-eaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got. Though God knows you're not what I had in mind—or thought I had in mind, anyway. But I do not intend to waste all that time and effort just to—to provide a very unappetising picnic for those things!'

Highwood opens like some lost Philip K. Dick novella and ends like the sort of conservative and occasionally Christian science-fiction which has always made Analog magazine a bit of a lottery.

Never mind.

Annihilation Factor

 

Barrington J. Bayley Annihilation Factor (1972)
Bayley's second novel features one of those star spanning galactic empires loosely resembling Tsarist Russia wherein different planets are ruled by kings and daily life occurs with a sort of imperial elegance, although thankfully not to the point of delineating those most delightful and diverting excursions of a gentleman with an ostentatiously elaborate name who conducts his business whilst rather fancifully attired in a bronze top hat to which the contents of a grandfather clock have been most felicitously affixed.

Ahem.

The presence of Castor Crakhno, a character alluding to Nestor Makhno - a founding father of the anarchist movement - presents the possibility of commentary on either the Russian revolution or some episode of equivalent vintage, as does King Maxim - Maxim being short for Maximilian, because I'm sure there was an historical Maximilian in there somewhere; but it's either way above my head or I'm simply spotting patterns which probably aren't there. The novel seems to be about free will - possibly - in how it may relate to the transcendence of the material plane 'n' stuff.

'You fool, there is no freedom,' Peredan chuckled. 'The material universe is a trap whose meshes we cannot escape, however much we try. Throughout history men have held such ideas as you have belatedly discovered, due to some fastidious aversion you appear to have. But the universe always mocks at these ideas. It always has something more strange, more monstrous than we can deal with—such as the Patch.'

Bayley's novels always seem to be spun upon a single and cinematically weird element - sentient hosiery, war waged between different eras, funny animals piloting spaceships or whatever. In Annihilation Factor it's the Patch, a vast presumably sentient field which moves through space devouring everything in its path. The Patch turns out to be something akin to Phil Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved but spends most of the novel as some remote nihilist force feared from afar - one which can be controlled by masturbation; despite which Bayley still doesn't quite manage to achieve escape velocity with this one.

It may be that I wasted too much time trying to decode Castor Crakhno, leader of a nihilist anarchist movement called Death to Life, which doesn't really work for me because the two tendencies would appear to contradict one another, at least here, and Death to Life sounds a little too close to a Two Ronnies take on placard waving revolutionary politics - Down With Knickers and that sort of thing. Also, the novel is so bogged down with endless exposition of one form or another that it becomes difficult to keep track of who is who and what's happening. It all pulls together in the end as we discover what the Patch is supposed to be, but it's a satisfying ending to an otherwise underwhelming, if mercifully short, novel. I still say Bayley was one of the greats, but Annihilation Factor isn't one I'd put forward in support of the argument, which is a pity because it should have been, given what it tries to do.

The Fall of Chronopolis

Barrington J. Bayley The Fall of Chronopolis (1974)
As a reformed Who junkie, The Fall of Chronopolis piques my interest not least for how much Time Lord stuff it seems to have foreshadowed. Bayley patently wasn't the first to write about a time war with combatants erasing great swathes of enemy history - and I'm not even sure it was Fritz Leiber, come to think of it - but the quota of this material which has since been reincarnated within The Book of the War and all from which it was drawn seems significant - there's even a ruling entity identified as the Imperator. Okay, so Bayley may not have been the first, but he was possibly the first to wrap his time travelling combatants in pomp, ritual and pseudo-religious symbolism; and in case you're interested, I've checked, and the television Time Lords were still vaguely utopian Star Trek knock-offs with a thing for white plastic when this was written.

But anyway, who gives a shit? Let's talk about the novel.

Chronopolis probably isn't Bayley's greatest, but it's decent. The only female character is a victim figure who is raped on at least four occasions, which is troubling, but probably shouldn't be the focus of ensuing discussion about the merits of the novel in any more general sense, arguably being an issue of that which Bayley failed to include or address rather than what we actually have here.

The story runs that time travel has become so common as to blur most distinctions between past and present, with different eras reduced to what may as well be geographical locations, and all in the name of something acknowledged as God. This society is at war with the Hegemony, which is itself from the far future, represented in the present by the Traumatics, the equivalent of a Satanic sect. There are paradoxes and a lot of playing around with different kinds of time as means of accounting for the same, so it's pretty damn weird and often very, very confusing, but rewards the effort of hanging on and powering through the more bewildering passages; and in case you were wondering, it's all about predestination, free will and that sort of thing. So it's chewy, but mostly in a good way, excepting for having failed the Bechdel test so profoundly as to border on impressive.

The Zen Gun

Barrington J. Bayley The Zen Gun (1983)
My friend Carl reports having read at least one stinker by the otherwise mostly wonderful Bayley. I keep on spinning that barrel but this game of used book roulette has thus far been kind to me where Bayley is concerned, and continues to be approximately kind with The Zen Gun. It's not a terribly ambitious novel in so much as that it's essentially yer basic space opera of a type which you can see would have looked good on the CV when Bayley pitched his Warhammer 40,000 tale. We have a galactic empire, rebels, an ultimate weapon, and something wrong with reality, but the joy is in the peculiarly nutty wallpaper with which he decorates this basic structure. Starting at the bottom, Bayley has rewritten the laws of physics in terms of such complexity as to warrant a separate essay on the subject; and he's repopulated the resulting cosmos with both talking animals and a human race in which anyone over the age of seven is considered adult; and in case you were wondering, the ultimate weapon is made of wood. Pout, a creature combining the genetic material of the entire primate family, first uses said weapon to tweak the nipples of a woman he secretly watches through her bedroom window.

It's nothing life changing, but it's enthusiastically weird and fun, and you can see why Moorcock held him in such high regard.

Eye of Terror

Barrington J. Bayley Eye of Terror (2000)
Shortly after plucking this one from the shelves at Half Price, I noticed it was a tie-in novel, and one of a series to which Dan Abnett has also contributed. This didn't strike me as a particularly good omen, although to be fair I had no idea what Warhammer 40,000 was supposed to be, and it's Barrington Bayley, so it must have something going for it, surely…

However, my first impressions seemed to bear out my fears, as briefly spunked out all over facebook.

It's pretty bloody awful - a novel which aspires to be a table full of little metal figures surrounded by grown men rolling funny-shaped dice in the basement of the mother of the one with the biggest beard. I bought it because it's Barrington Bayley, and Barrington Bayley is fab and weird, but this reads like something written to pay a hefty phone bill - such a waste of a genuine talent. Maybe it gets better. I'll give it another fifty pages.

It was embarrassing once I realised that a couple of my facebook friends were into that whole gaming business. It's not a pursuit which had ever inspired me towards any strong opinion, but what opinions I had were formed back in 1987 when some beardy dude at art college tried to recruit me into his Dungeons & Dragons enclave. He described the rules, most of which seemed to be about him controlling everything and everyone, and it didn't sound much like fun as I would recognise it. The guy was clearly a tosser and so that very much coloured my judgement of anything involving funny shaped dice; also, there's not many things I dislike so much as a novel which really, really wishes it were telly, so the prospect of a novel that wants to be a fucking game seemed depressing beyond reason.

I vividly recall the impression garnered from the first fifty pages which inspired the above facebook comment - far too many adjectives, an overly choreographed fight every five minutes, and all set in one of those Larry Niven universes full of alien bars wherein things with two heads get drunk, stab you, or attempt to interest you in the services of a prostitute with six tits and two fannies; but I persisted, and it got better, and after a while it began to feel like Barrington Bayley again.

The Warhammer 40,000 universe may as well be the same one inhabited by Nemesis the Warlock in 2000AD, roughly speaking, grimy pseudo-medieaval military science-fiction with Tolkien, Lovecraft, and a load of other squelchy influences thrown in; and therefore clearly entirely compatible with the sort of weirdness in which Bayley specialised. Eye of Terror is mostly space marines possessed by demons, Chaos Gods, stomach-churning transformations, and all manner of things which would probably lose a ton of advertising revenue were they to turn up in Star Wars. I don't know what it's about, if it's really about anything, but it becomes vivid and even gripping as the story finds its pace. Strangest of all, disbelieving that something so good should have begun on such poor footing, I skipped back to the beginning and could find nothing of the material which had inspired my initial groaning. Either I acclimated to the novel or the book itself changed as I was reading it.

Very weird.

Star Winds

Barrington J. Bayley Star Winds (1978)
This is the point at which I stumble and fly arse over tit in my mad scramble to embrace Bayley as my new favourite author that you've never heard of, the fervour of which is informed by my not really having heard of him until fairly recently. The big ideas are all here within a thoroughly well-cemented setting, either a remote mediaeval future or variant history reading as swashbuckling fantasy - which I write without the faintest idea of what a swash might be or why it should require buckling. We sail to the stars in old time galleons with sails made from a material which catches the ether like wind, the hulls of our vessels caulked so as to keep in the air; except we don't sail to the stars any more because we're running out of the stuff from which the sails are woven and it can't be made on Earth on account of how we're too close to the sun. Our hero therefore sails to Mars. No-one has been there for a couple of generations, and rumour has it that Mars is of sufficient distance from the sun as to allow for manufacture of those magic sails; and this in turn leads to a voyage further out into the depths of space in search of the philosopher's stone. All that bollocks about atoms has been proven false and we're now in a new age of alchemy, in case it wasn't already obvious.

So the ideas are great. The problem is that the book just isn't very interesting. I'm not even sure why this should be given the fantastic setting and scenarios, but it just seemed to go on for a couple of hundred pages and then stop without having really said anything. In truth, whilst technically perfectly adequate, Star Winds feels a little phoned-in, like Bayley wasn't quite sure what to do with the story once he'd got past the initial excitement of such a peculiar premise. Given the dramatically increased quota of science fiction titled with Star prefixing a second noun in the immediate wake of Star Wars, and that Star Winds reads like it really just wants to romp, I'm inclined to wonder if Bayley wasn't just trying to get a few bills paid here; which is a shame because this novel should have been amazing.

The Star Virus

Barrington J. Bayley The Star Virus (1970)
In a 1999 interview, Michael Moorcock - Bayley's friend and collaborator - asks Juha Lindroos:

Did you know William Burroughs loved The Star Virus and wrote to tell me he'd used it as inspiration? The idea of people as a virus very much appealed to Burroughs, who enjoyed at least some of Barry's work, though I don't know how much he read. Burroughs definitely recognised the originality of mind.

Whatever you may make of such a recommendation, it seems to say something about the quality of Bayley's writing, which in turn raises questions as to why he isn't better remembered.

I don't know. I suppose it's all to do with marketing.

Anyway, the quality of the writing really stands out as incongruous with something which has become so difficult to find and apparently resistant to reprinting. The guy really paints pictures, beautifully drawn sentences and a love of unusually baroque imagery suggesting genuine confidence - a man very much at one with his typewriter, and who probably didn't really have to write science-fiction, but thank God he did. It's so much better when sprung from conscious choice rather than necessity.

This being my second Bayley - or fourth if you count a couple of fairly long and thoroughly peculiar short stories - I'm beginning to notice themes and preoccupations - the nutty scientist who seems more John Dee than anything of Asimov's heritage; plant life exerting control over humanity; and unexpected, inexplicable structures underlying our existence, even our history. The Star Virus is a significantly philosophical novel seemingly concerning free will and whether it plays a role in the course of the future, or destiny if you must; and it manages to do this with space pirates, rockets, an inscrutable alien civilisation, and a star drive based on the perception of an observer; and all of this without reading like the work of anyone else, or at the risk of alienating anyone who just happens to be in it for the planets and the monsters. It achieves something quite complex whilst appearing fairly straightforward.

Seeing as I've already given the game away, the virus in question is the projected spread of humanity across the galaxy - this being contrary to the established history of the universe in relation to something older and more abstract. In case it isn't obvious, and in the event of anyone reading who might care about such things, you could quite easily read The Star Virus as inhabiting the same basic cosmos as Faction Paradox, if that helps, and certainly it is writing of this kind which I would say has been ancestral to the aforementioned mythos, whether directly or otherwise.

Mask of Chaos

John Jakes Mask of Chaos (1970)
This is another of those Ace Doubles, and hence a title which has found its way to my bookshelf mainly by virtue of being stuck to the back of Barrington Bayley's The Star Virus. Typically I assumed John Jakes would turn out to be another forgotten pulp-by-association science fiction author, maybe even one in the vein of Robert Moore Williams if I was lucky. However, a quick pog at Wikipedia reveals this to be an obscure formative work by some guy who went on to shift novels by the truckload, mostly historical jobs set around the time of the American civil war and of the kind which tend to get adapted as television miniseries. North and South was one of his, if you've heard of that. I hadn't, but my wife watched it when she was a teenager. Patrick Swayze was in it and I understand there may have been some shagging and people saying that they do declare.

Mask of Chaos gets off to a start at least as promising as its wonderful cover, fast-paced and yet written with enough flair to suggest Jakes was at least trying, and with a pleasant sense of van Vogt-style Dadaism at work. There's an inventive if slightly peculiar use of language, such as space off as an expletive; but for all its screwy promise, the narrative quickly settles to a certain level of cheese which isn't exactly bad, but tends to limit one's expectations as to how good the rest of the thing is likely to be, or at least it limited my expectations:

'Poetess,' she corrected. 'That's not my real line. That's only what I write on customs forms. My real occupation is woman.'

'Yeah, I can certainly see that.'

The heavy attempt didn't go over. 'You think I'm playing word games. Wipe it. I'm not. There's little enough love out in the stars the way it is. If anybody should know that, from what Fochet explained about you, it should be you. I write poetry as a hobby. Otherwise I'm a full-time, professional woman. I've been a mother, a wife, a mistress, a sweetheart. Sometimes paid, sometimes not, depending on my need, the man's need, and the atmosphere of the situation. Do you realise, Mike, how many women on the inhabited planets work at all kinds of professions except the one profession for which they were specifically engineered? Ninety-nine point nine percent of the women everywhere are like that. Women, and everything but. But I'm a professional. Needless to say, it's not a recognised occupation. The authorities on most planets disapprove of seeing it on forms. I've learned to write poetess pretty fast.'

'I'll bet you're good at it.'

'At being a woman?'

'Yeah.'

She smiled, really smiled, then. Dazzling.

'I am. Be good and you might find out.'

Phwoar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

Mask of Chaos maroons our boy, Mike - a cyborg whose name is an inexplicable contraction of Micropig - on a world where everyone wears a mask. He hooks up with Ab, poetess and professional woman who provides the brains to his brawn, and then the two of them just sort of hang around in the vicinity of the story for the next hundred or so pages. The masks are worn because everyone is horribly disfigured, although we never discover why so it's probably some heavy-handed allegory. Mike and Ab find themselves in opposition to this masked society for no adequately explained reason given that the society in question doesn't seem particularly oppressive or dystopian. They spend most of the novel embroiled in a game - a deadly game in which the prize is etc. etc., which seems to be one of those deals such as we saw in Rollerball or any number of crappy future sport strips in 2000AD comic. Of course, it could have gone either way given that a story is as much how it is written as that which it is written about, but the problem here is that we don't actually find out what the objective of this game might be, how our couple are expected to win it, or what is at stake. There's some mumbled explanation about a game without rules, suggesting Jakes scrabbling at whatever van Vogt was trying to do in The World of Null-A, but it feels like an excuse, particularly as the same absence of either dynamic or purpose infects the story as a whole.

Mask of Chaos isn't bad, but it's hard to say what it actually is, which is a pity for something which starts off so well and with such original promise.

The Garments of Caean

Barrington J. Bayley The Garments of Caean (1976)
I read The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor and The Four-Colour Problem in New Worlds collections and was a little bewildered as to why I hadn't otherwise heard of this seemingly underrated and under-publicised author; and The Four-Colour Problem stood out in particular for betraying a profound William Burroughs influence, for making use of the cut-up technique, and for getting away with it without reading like the work of a tribute act. Obviously I whipped this one from the shelf the second I saw it, unable to resist the lure of a cover so fabulous as to make the cast of Glee performing an Elton John medley sound like Pierre Schaeffer; and against all odds, it lives up to my already elevated expectations.

The story revolves around the much-feared Caean empire and is told from the perspective of their less-sartorially elevated galactic neighbours. There's something weird about the Caeanics, notably that whilst obviously of human descent, the near-hypnotic Caean personality is seated entirely within their admittedly sumptuously tailored clothing. Their bodies are only the fleshy machines by which garments are conveyed from one place to another. I won't give too much else away, but the story spans numerous worlds including one where all plant and animal life has evolved natural sonic weaponry, and a colony of variant humans adapted to life in open space.

The Garments of Caean doesn't make any attempt at aping Burroughs as I half-expected, but it's clearly sprung from the same peculiar imagination as those earlier bits and pieces I read in New Worlds. It's bursting with wonderfully bizarre ideas thrown out in passing, ideas which other authors would have expanded to at least a trilogy. It's one of the most engrossing things I've read in a while, and is engrossing by similar terms to the very best of Philip K. Dick or A.E. van Vogt, with whom it seems to share some sense of kinship, or at least equivalent surrealism. The key to this is probably that it has purpose beyond just spinning us a space opera, and whilst the philosophical dimension - mostly discussion of the relationship between image and self - may not be anything new, it makes a pleasant change to come across such musings in so hugely entertaining a context as we have here.

It's been a while since I added any new names to the I must read everything this person has written list, but Bayley definitely makes the grade.

The Ticket That Exploded

William S. Burroughs The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
The Ticket That Exploded is one of Burroughs' more intense cut-up novels in that the cut-up texts tend to dominate with not much in the way of more conventional forms to dilute the flow of information; and those parts of the narrative comprising regular, instructional texts about the operation of tape recorders and suchlike tend to be punctuated by means of hyphens rather than full stop with no additional concession to sentence structure, thus blurring the distinction.

Cut-up text is of course not so much random words and phrases as words and phrases selected for their apparent meaning from otherwise effectively random words and phrases. As with much of Burroughs' writing of this kind, impressions are formed by the images which seem to be described, and so a narrative appears to emerge as you read, even if it's hardly a linear narrative. One supposed purpose of the cut-up is divinatory or at least revelatory, allowing either the future or the truth to be revealed as a pattern within the otherwise random juxtaposition. Being as The Ticket That Exploded seems mostly written as random juxtapositions, it feels like certain truths of modern life and western society skinned and sanded down to expose the workings - not pretty to look at, but that's what's really going on here.

Word evokes image does it not? - Try it - Put an image track on screen and accompany it with any soundtrack - Now play the soundtrack back alone and watch the image track fill in - So? What is word? - Maya - Maya - Illusion - Rub out the word and the image track goes with it -

A lot of this reminds me of Debord's spectacle, specifically the separation of that which exists from its own image:

This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by intangible as well as tangible things, which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

This is probably nothing new in terms of either Burroughs or whatever it was I said about any of his other books, but it's worth saying, and worth noting how Burroughs managed to give each novel its own distinctive flavour despite that he was doing something essentially quite repetitive for most of his career. This one feels closer to science-fiction in the traditional sense than at least a few of the others, and still without following any conventions of the form, aside from a curious nod to Henry Kuttner's Fear; and on the subject of such references, I'm also intrigued to have here found a mention of New Worlds magazine and specifically Barrington Bayley, to whom Burroughs credits some innovation or other. I don't know much about Bayley, beyond having enjoyed The Four-Colour Problem. I had an impression of him essentially being the English Burroughs tribute act, but it's nice to think that there may have been some two-way exchange of ideas between these writers.

Actually, apropos of nothing and seeing as we're here, I can't help but notice that almost everyone with whom Burroughs ever shared a cup of tea and an iced bun turns up in one of his books except for Porridge, despite them having been such amazing bezzies and all that. Curious.

But anyway...

Get it out of your head and into the machines. Stop talking stop arguing. Let the machines talk and argue. A tape recorder is an externalised section of the human nervous system. You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture.

So we are recordings of ourselves, or something along those lines. This is one of those books you really need to read for yourself, because what it says is fairly important - once you've divined it from the entrails - and there's no point trusting to the version in summary of what is, after all, only a review.