Interesting enough. I know that the portrayal of the facist bigots was not supposed to be flattering but the repeated casual use of a slur bothered me. ( )

Interesting ideas about time explored within a rather bleak vision of mankind as profoundly racist and narcissistic. Make Earth Great Again! ( )

In questo notevole “Collision Course”, la dittatura vagamente nazista che domina il futuro descritto da Bayley ritiene di avere un asso nella manica: il viaggio nel tempo. Ma i viaggi nel futuro hanno rivelato la presenza di una razza aliena che ha invaso la Terra e ha lasciato delle rovine enigmatiche: queste rovine, infatti, col passare del tempo sembrano diventare sempre più recenti, invece di cadere progressivamente in polvere.
Da qui inizia una serie di scoperte inedite nella fantascienza: esseri che vivono passando dal futuro al passato, e per i quali il corso del tempo è l'opposto del nostro; piste temporali che entrano in collisione; un essere spaziale dai poteri quasi divini; un mondo artificiale che si è ritirato nel profondo degli spazi interstellari e che è rigorosamente diviso in due parti sfasate tra loro.

Collision Course (a.k.a. Collision With Chronos) is a blessedly brief and fast-moving tale of an Earth so far in the future that the history of Communism is a series of garbled myths that finds itself facing imminent destruction as it faces both attacks from lemur-like creatures from the future and total destruction as both time streams -- the one ruled by the Nazi-like, racial purity-obsessed Titans and the one in the Titans' future ruled by the lemurs (the Titans are in their future) -- are racing headlong into a direct impact with each other.

Bayley here presents a concept of time that he cribbed from John William Dunne, the Irish aeronautical engineer who was instrumental in the development of stable military aircraft and who also wrote several philosophical/parapsychological books such as the often-reprinted An Experiment With Time (1927) and, more importantly here (according to Bayley's note at the end of the book), The Serial Universe (1934). (According to Dunne's Wikipedia entry, Aldous Huxley and J.B. Priestly also "enthusiastically embraced his ideas".) -

Here, not only does time run in multiple directions, but life itself is merely a by-product (and far from being the only by-product...) of time: travel into the future or past of one's own timeline will show an utterly dead and barren world, until you've adjusted your own time to the normative time-flow of where you've landed. There's also a deus ex machina figure called the Oblique Entity -- so-called because it exists obliquely in time -- that prefers the word "here" as a personal pronoun, instead of "I" or "we."

Collision Course is also a neat fillip to the racial prejudice underpinning so much of early science fiction, turning the "Yellow Peril" attitudes of Buck Rogers (or, for purists, Philip Francis Nowlan's Armageddon 2419 A.D. and The Airlords of Han) and Flash Gordon on their heads. And while Bayley's work is considered to be part of the "British New Wave" of science fiction (along with that of such writers as J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss), Collision Course is very much old school when it comes to such things as character development, dialogue, or significant parts for women: Collision Course is very much a "Man's Man's Man's World", but, at a mere 174 pages, it's refreshing to have a "paperback original" novel present such a relatively fresh take on the time travel story. ( )

Imagine an Earth ruled by a Fascist regime whose primary goal is racial purity. Now it finds itself being invaded from the other side of the time-stream. That’s the premise of Barrington Bayley’s novel Collision Course.

http://fireandsword.blogspot.com/2007/06/collision-course-by-barrington-bayley.h...