Customer Reviews

Collision Course

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This story combines several conflicts in interesting ways. 1) Earth is ruled by "Titans" which are a race of humans that has deemed themselves "better" than other races and also has the resources to enforce this. 2) There seem to be ancient alien buildings on Earth and at one time the aliens seem to have destroyed much of Earth's civilization. The Titans are very interested in preventing a repeat of the alien invasion. 3) It becomes apparent that the alien ruins are becoming younger (aging in reverse) and that an alien attack is believed to be coming from the future. 4) 100s of light-years out in space a very advanced human civilization that escaped a previous collapse on Earth lives in a double bottle shaped ship called "Retort City" which one bottle containing a worker class and the other a leisure class. These people are apparently originally from China and have near mastery of time and space. Thus they have set it up so that one bottle is 25 years in time from the other and at birth newborns from one side are passed to the other. People are raised by their grandparents and overall the population gets distributed between workers and leisure with both sides being very good at their respective tasks. 5) One Retort citizen on the Leisure side hides his newborn child but at age 10 the child is discovered and sent to the worker side meaning he's one of the very rare individuals (the first in centuries) to know about life on both sides. This person becomes a rebel that wants to abolish the worker/leisure system. As punishment he is sent to Earth but ends up teaming up with the Titans who try to take over Retort City.

A central theme is the concept of time as waves passing through the universe and that there are many such waves. Before and after a wave the universe is dead (no life) and it's only at the very wave edges that life exists. Time travel is quite easy but you will only see a dead universe in both the past and future. You can look but any changes you make simply "don't happen" as the time wave is not in "now." This neatly gets around time paradoxes.

REVIEW FOR BARRINGTON BAYLEY'S COLLISION COURSE -- apparently there's another book by the same name filed under this title on amazon

Barrington J. Bayley's Collision Course (Collision with Chronos) (1973) is based on a fascinating hard sci-fi premise, the intersection of two time waves, one from the future heading into the past, and the "present", heading into the future. In short, there are two "presents" moving towards each other with the possibility of annihilation.

Of course, Barrington J. Bayley has to explain these complicated paradoxes and actually comes up with an interesting if somewhat hokey (but original) theory. The "now" band of time is but a side effect of the universe and not a principle. Thus, time bands crops up at varying points heading in varying directions across infinite universes. What's so interesting about this interpretation of time and time travel is that most time travel clichés (time loops, meeting oneself in the past) are done away with. Time travel novels tend to tred the same ground in slightly different paths (and often identical paths), thus, Collision Course is a breath of fresh air despite its flaws. Any "fresh air" is welcome in an often moribund sub-genre.

Plot Summary (limited spoilers)

Henske, an archaeologist, works at an archaeological dig at an "ancient" city. However, mysterious evidence crops up that the ruins are actually, inexplicably, getting younger.

Earth, at this point in the future, is ruled with an iron fist by the Titans - blonde, blue eyed - who pursue an agenda of racial superiority over so-called deviants "sub-species." The Titans believe that they're exemplars of true man and the other racial groups (mostly annihilated) are the result of an alien weapon in the distant past that mutated the human gene pool.

Soon Henske, who reluctantly (but somewhat sincerely) believes these arguments, is summoned by the Titans to a secret archaeological discover, an "alien" time ship. Using the time ship Henske (and a physicist colleague) discover that a time wave (of sorts) is moving backward towards the "present." Thus, the strange ruins ARE getting younger. However, for this future time wave and it's "humanish" inhabitants, the "future" is Henske's past.

At another point, Retort space city resides.... Divided into two sections, one occupied by a separate world of production workers, the other is filled with intellectuals, artists, etc supported by the production sphere. The two never interact except for a bizarre system where children are exchanged: production workers know that their children will live in the luxury of the other world while the utopian section know that their children will be sent to the production sphere... And, they have mastered the art of manipulating time....

The two plots eventually intertwine...

Final Thoughts

Retort city is peculiar and quite interesting and I wish that more of the plot concerned the city. I also know where Dan Simmons lifted the concept of the time tombs found in his Hyperion series of books. This is a very interesting read and one of Bayley's better works (not up to par with Fall of Chronopolis but close). The characters are lacking as always although Henske is better than most of Bayley's cardboard cutouts. Bayley's novels survive entirely on concepts and imagination and he succeeds here. BUT WHERE ARE THE FEMALE CHARACTERS?- one gets the feeling that Bayley has some aversion to women since they factor in only a few pages as most. Collision Course is definitely worth reading for any sci-fi fan -- especially those interested in time travel theories and the sci-fi it spawns. The time travel concept (as in Fall of Chronopolis) is so original that it avoids all (most?) time-travel clichés...

Nigel Hinton tells the story of a boy who cannot resist the temptation of trying out a motorbike that has been parked outside a pub with the engine running. The reader feels Ray's fascination as he mounts the bike and goes for his first ride which ends in a fatal accident as he loses control of the bike and runs down an elderly lady (chapter one). It is particularly this chapter that lends itself to EFL-teaching as it is exciting and full of useful vocabulary.