Barrington Bayley - Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus - The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Star Winds

The Fall of Chronopolis

The Forest of Peldain

The Garments of Caean

The Grand Wheel

The Great Hydration

The Pillars of Eternity

The Rod of Light

The Soul of the Robot

The Star Virus

The Zen Gun

The Knights of the Limits

The Seed of Evil

Barrington J. Bayley (1937–2008)

Barrington J. Bayley was born in Birmingham and began writing science fiction in his early teens. After serving in the RAF, he took up freelance writing on features, serials and picture strips, mostly in the juvenile field, before returning to straight SF. He was a regular contributor to the influential New Worlds magazine and an early voice in the New Wave movement.

Enter the SF Gateway…

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

If you’ve enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you’ll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.

For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy…

For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet…

Visit the SF Gateway.

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 2014

The Soul of the Robot copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1974

The Knights of the Limits copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1979

The Fall of Chronopolis copyright © Barrington J. Bayley 1974

Introduction copyright © SFE Ltd 2014

All rights reserved.

The right of Barrington J. Bayley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House

5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 473 20194 1

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A break in the manuscript occurs here – Ed.

By way of example, we conceive of Two as ‘Two Ones’.

A second break occurs in the manuscript here. The Narrator pleads that this section was too ephemeral to remember or too abstruse to be outlined in words; The Editor surmises that his invention had run dry – Ed.

An instrument for peering into caves and hollows through the surrounding rock.