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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment