Now Playing: Barrington J Bayley (1937-2008)
A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the upstairs bookcase when I chanced upon my copy of Barrington Bayley's THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT. Great book, I thought immediately - it had been boxed away for years and I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen it. I do remember the massive enjoyment I'd had in reading it, twenty odd years ago, and how the titular character - Jasperodus - had stuck in my mind as a kind of emblematic ideal of the science fictional robot. A little of him, I think, rubbed off on Hesperus from my own own HOUSE OF SUNS.
But seeing the book also reminded me of a period when I'd managed to read quite a bit of Bayley, before his books and collections became harder to find. His imagination was quite unlike that of any of his comtemporaries. When I read his short story "Sporting with the Chid", I genuinely felt that it was the most marvellously demented thing I'd ever read, the product of a truly lunatic and unfettered mind. In short: a group of astronauts are captured by ingenious aliens with a knack for bio-engineering. The aliens' great achievement is the ability to make bodily organs function independently of each other, and to this end they devise a "game" for their human prisoners. The astronauts' brains are surgically removed and converted into independent, mobile entities. Their bodies, meanwhile, sans brains, are set walking in zombie mode towards the edge of a cliff. The objective of the brains is to catch up, climb back into the empty skulls and recover control before the bodies walk off the cliff.
Show that one to the next person who says SF is undeserving of literary respectability...
It wasn't just that story, though. I enjoyed almost everything of his that I read, and when Bayley had a story in Interzone, it was always that one I turned to first. Gratifyingly, it wasn't just me - Bayley always seemed to do well in the reader poll results. He could be riotously funny, as well. One of his last stories was a delightful tale of juvenile deliquency among sentient crabs and ... well, you, had to be there, really.
I never met Bayley or had any correspondence with him, but - even though I still had much of his work to catch up with - he remained one of my favorite British writers. Let's hope that posterity treats him well, and that some of those brilliant stories are made readily available again.
