Barrington J. Bayley has been plugging away without much commercial success or critical notice since 1954, when his first story appeared in Vergo Statten Science Fiction Magazine, a publication that appears to have infected the author with its historical invisibility. Bayley was one of three key writers (the others were Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard) who conspired to change science fiction by launching the New Wave in the 1970s. Moorcock is now famous among science fiction and fantasy readers, and Ballard is an international phenomenon who has reached far beyond his home genre. Yet Bayley remains virtually unknown and undiscussed — except by a small number of colossi of the field such as Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. Sterling had this to say about him:

Bayley writes science fiction with the natural fluency of a man who can’t help it. He has the ineffable, unfakeable genius of a true SF visionary: of Wells, Stapledon, and Ballard; of Bester, Dick, and Farmer.

Small things do not content this man. He is tooling along in second gear if he does not blow your mind ten times in eighteen pages. He is at home re-inventing the nature of space-time, stretching the limits of consciousness, reassembling reality. He leaps past the jugular and deep into the frontal lobes.

Expert praise is lovely, but it hardly makes up for a lack of presence in the minds of genre readers, or worse, genre buyers. Bayley appears to have lost his drive some time after writing The Zen Gun in 1982, only to regain it with a flurry of stories in Interzone around the late 90s, and then drying up again after 2001. And now he’s back in Futures, the regular story at the back of Nature.

“Party Smart Card” is a neat little story that draws on the sort of neural technology that Greg Egan explored in “The Walk”. While Egan’s story is more philosophically robust and emotionally engaged, Bayley has taken the same basic principle, extended it beyond Egan’s two characters in a crucible, and added his own brand of sparkle and wit. Unfortunately, he pulls away from the neat logical twist that I think the ending needs, but at least Bayley provides a satisfactory if somewhat pat resolution.

Many of the Futures stories suffer from the fact that they have to fit on one page, which makes it virtually impossible to develop a fully-rounded story. Most of the Futures pieces are merely ideas riding about in clanky narrative chariots. The best writers have accepted the limitation and adapted standard narrative structure by neglecting it altogether, as Ted Chiang did with “What’s Expected Of Us” from July last year, and of course Frederic Brown did with his famous short-shorts from the late 50s, especially the perfect and much-anthologised “Answer.” Bayley, having seen the trumps, has the sense to follow suit.

It’s such a pleasure to see Bayley in print again that I hope this spurs some much-belated recognition, and even better, a new surge of activity from the writer himself.

• Barrington J. Bayley, “Party Smart Card” Nature 440, 714 (30 March 2006)
• Ted Chiang, “What’s Expected Of Us” Nature 436, 150 (7 July 2005)
• Frederic Brown, “Answer” in Angels and Spaceships, E.P. Dutton, 1954