Customer Reviews

The Fall of Chronopolis

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It is Astounding! Amazing! Thrilling! But also Philosophical! Cosmological! Metaphysical!

THE FALL OF CHRONOPOLIS is possibly the most sustained single novel from Bayley's pen, juggling its numerous plots that thread through excitement and literariness with the assuredness of a zen master. The massive time-fleets, armadas of spaceships the size of cities patrol the universe and battle against their eternal enemy, The Hegemony, through the jungles of time and pastures of space. The novel is brief but packs a punch that makes you dizzy from invention. It rewards several reads for all the subtext hiding behind the obvious and exciting surface, dealing with issues like the cyclic nature of the universe, fascism and religion for the sake of high drama. It is a vivid, visceral ride through the universe that will knock your senses wide open if you're attuned to this brand of extravagance.

This is, in all probability, the best time travel-related book I have read - surpassing even Asimov's END OF TIME.

The Story:
Captain Aton of the 3rd Time Fleet of the Chronotic Empire is engaged in conflict with the Hegemony from the future. Betrayed and court-martialed, he is about to embark on an unexpected and arduous task.

Time is uncannily like an ocean. The Chronotic Empire controls one part of the surface while the Hegemony occupies another (the future). The surface of time is a wave-function with the crests, or nodes, separated by 170 years from those in front and behind. Only at these nodes can someone travel from the past or future and remain without any continuous expenditure of chronotic energy. The Chronotic Empire controls seven nodes and the non-nodal historical time that surrounds them. The Empire continues to stretch its control over more and more nodes and the Hegemony, in fear that it's time frame will be overwhelmed by the temporally expanding Empire gets control of a device, a time distorter, which completely removes any object, person or place from existence anywhere in time - so that it or he/she never existed!

In the meanwhile, Hulmu, Lord of the Depths, is stirring far below the surface in the Gulf of Lost Souls. Hulmu a potential creature of the depths, along with his Minion and the heretical sect of Traumatics want Hulmu to become real and they can only do so by making sure that the fabric of real time becomes so distorted that creatures such as himself could come into existence. To do that Mankind must be eliminated.

Aside from a great & original story, there are various metaphysical concepts running through the work. Brilliant and Original - and reading it is, indeed, time well spent.

This is a very good book, with an interesting premise: An empire that exists in time, not just space. The empire is under attack, and the method of battle is to go back in time and outflank the opponent by changing what happened in the past, hence changing the present.

The book is not long, but really packs a lot of great sci-fi ideas regarding time travel and society. It is a nice combination of action and ideas, you won't be bored.

I read the book quite some years ago, but as I recollect, I really did care about the characters, otherwise I wouldn't give the book a good rating.

Definitely worth a read.

The Fall of Chronopolis (The Last and Final Days of the Chronotic Empire) by the relatively unknown British sci-fi author, Barrington J. Bayley, is one the best time travel book I've ever read. Other reviewers have suggested that this is Bayley's best as well -- I'll reserve judgment until I've read The Garment of Caen. Bayley's works live off of interesting ideas (often epic feats of the imagination). Without the allure of these ideas, his novels are husks -- characterless, often poorly written, forced, and shoddily paced. That said, Bayley's prose is just passable enough that images accompanying the ideas remain with us.

The Fall of Chronopolis crams into a fast-paced 174 pages the veritable history of the entire empire experienced by the "main" characters (facilitated by the technology of time-travel of course). The scope is vast (through time and space). The Chronotic Empire has erected a time travel stop-barrier just after the point in time of the creation of the time machine to stop tampering with this vital invention -- all other time travel (especially by the Imperial Family) is fair game.

Briefly summarized (Bayley does relish explaining and re-explaining his complicated theory of time travel throughout the work) time travel works as follows: time is made of stratum (strat) and by moving through this stratum one can emerge into orthographical time at any point in time. However, Bayley further complicates this by adding Nodes -- which move forward at a constant pace (the capital Chronopolis for example). I'm not going to try to explain this bizarre theory -- however, unlike other novels dealing with time travel, Bayley does attempt to flesh out the theoretical elements (in pseudo-scientific terms of course).


(some spoilers)

The city of Chronopolis governs the Chronotic empire by moving forward and backward, creating paradoxes, and rectifying others. The Chronotic Empire is at odds with the Hegemony, created in the future by the Traumatic sect (with drastically different beliefs than the official Church). The Hegemony attempts to preserve the Traumatic sect which spawns its own empire while the Chronotic Empire attempts to root out the Traumatics to remove the Hegemony. Enter: the time distorter controlled by the Hegemony. The time distorter removes entire cities entirely (queue inspiration for the Voyager episodes Year of Hell Part I and Part II). This weapon causes (initially) only slight disturbances in the fabric of the Chronotic Empire. These changes are gauged by Achronal Archives at Chronopolis which are protected from the outside time changes by time barriers. Here knowledge of the cities, planets, civilizations, removed entirely from the spectrum of time are preserved although the outside world NEVER knew that these cities and planets and civilizations even existed. This is perhaps the most fascinating element of the work.

The plot revolves around Captain Anton who is falsely accused of deserting his post by members of the Traumatic sect who had infiltrated his ship. He is sentenced to death as a messenger sent through the strat -- however, Anton's kill word is never uttered and his journey causes a drastic transformation. I best not give away the rest of the plot, but it involves rescuing a victim of the Traumatic sect, a large computer which speaks gibberish, a senile emperor, various disturbed members of the imperial court falling in love with their own future forms and dead bodies of their relatives, etc etc.

Bayley successfully weaves grand ideas, well-realized religions which spawn from these ideas, a plot with odd twists and turns, vivid images of corpulence and decay, battles between time ships, time paradoxes, and a fleshed out theory of time travel into a wonderful, action packed read. The third act is somewhat of a let down -- although the very end is a fascinating spin on the "save-the empire" cliché. Definitely worth checking out -- thankfully, Fall of Chronopolis was recently reprinted!

Two fleets of ships war through time. The Captain of one vessel falls prey to one of his staff, a member of a secret cult. They both survive, and the Captain, exposed to the timestream and amnesiac is convicted when court-martialled. A capital crime, he will be used as a time courier.

Exposure to the 'strat' twice affects him differently, and he discovers that the conflict is definitely not as it seems, and there is a much greater battle raging.