The Knights of the Limits

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: It's easy to underestimate Barrington Bayley at first glance. His prose is a straightforward pulp style, without literary pretensions or stylistic experiments. No SF writer, however, is better at launching you into a weird universe within a few sentences and weaving a torrent of madcap ideas into full-throttle, action-packed plots. If you like the writing of Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, or Robert Sheckley, you're almost certain to be a Bayley fan, and this collection of superb stories is a good place to start. Bayley's work combines the social concerns of Dick, Bester, Sheckley, and Frederik Pohl with some of the more philosophical issues of "hard" SF writers such as Heinlein and Poul Anderson. Pure entertainment brimming with thought-provoking ideas --- what more can you ask from a book of science fiction stories?

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: It's easy to underestimate Barrington Bayley at first glance. His prose is a straightforward pulp style, without literary pretensions or stylistic experiments. No SF writer, however, is better at launching you into a weird universe within a few sentences and weaving a torrent of madcap ideas into full-throttle, action-packed plots. If you like the writing of Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, or Robert Sheckley, you're almost certain to be a Bayley fan, and this collection of superb stories is a good place to start. Bayley's work combines the social concerns of Dick, Bester, Sheckley, and Frederik Pohl with some of the more philosophical issues of "hard" SF writers such as Heinlein and Poul Anderson. Pure entertainment brimming with thought-provoking ideas --- what more can you ask from a book of science fiction stories?

Rating:
Summary: barkingly brilliant
Review: This is Bayley at the peak of his powers, barkingly brilliant. The thought experiments he weaves into a mosaic of energetic stories works its way to you like Borges on speed, a strange hybrid of Rudy Rucker, Italo Calvino and A. E. van Vogt - yet the core of it remains inescapably Bayley's own brand of strange sf. It's more like speculative cosmology, except Freeman Dyson would never have come up with ideas like Bayley's:

Like; what if the universe was completely filled with rock? And each of us is living in a little bubble in the rock. In other words, the basic premise of the story is impossible because the universe is not full of rock. But he's like, "what if it was?" And he goes on to describe attempts at space travel in this universe, the problems that arise, and ends the whole shebang with an orgasmic zen buzz to your frontal lobes. Wow. And then there more, each story going off on wild tangents into space and time and the lack thereof. If you think you're up for the ride, go for it. But be warned - this is NOT extrapolative hard sf, this is utterly original speculative stuff that will mess with your notions of reality and boggle the mind.

Rating:
Summary: barkingly brilliant
Review: This is Bayley at the peak of his powers, barkingly brilliant. The thought experiments he weaves into a mosaic of energetic stories works its way to you like Borges on speed, a strange hybrid of Rudy Rucker, Italo Calvino and A. E. van Vogt - yet the core of it remains inescapably Bayley's own brand of strange sf. It's more like speculative cosmology, except Freeman Dyson would never have come up with ideas like Bayley's:

Like; what if the universe was completely filled with rock? And each of us is living in a little bubble in the rock. In other words, the basic premise of the story is impossible because the universe is not full of rock. But he's like, "what if it was?" And he goes on to describe attempts at space travel in this universe, the problems that arise, and ends the whole shebang with an orgasmic zen buzz to your frontal lobes. Wow. And then there more, each story going off on wild tangents into space and time and the lack thereof. If you think you're up for the ride, go for it. But be warned - this is NOT extrapolative hard sf, this is utterly original speculative stuff that will mess with your notions of reality and boggle the mind.