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.
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.
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