The Forest of Peldain

You wonder how many of them are out there...gnarled, twisted sci-fi savants whose pulp masterpieces have long since fallen off the radar of popular consciousness. They lionized Dick in time to throw him a few bones before he kicked the bucket, and even Ted Sturgeon appears to be undergoing a revival these days...But what about this guy, Barrington J. Bayley? Never heard of him? Neither had I, until following the goadings of B. Sterling's on-line rag Cheap Truth which praised him to the skies, I took a crawl through Berkeley's used bookstores and managed to scare up a few tattered copies of Bayley's late 70's/early 80s paperbacks, of which The Forest of Peldain is one. Ladies and gents, this is one of the great speculative fiction writers of our time. Reading one of his novels (I recommend The Grand Wheel as an introduction, if you can find it) is to take a blazing trip across the underbelly of the universe, where time, space, and chance are embedded objects vibrating in the matrix of a thoroughly-stoned Master Mechanic's head. This is imaginative sponteneity of the finest sort. Seek it out. The dude deserves a wider audience than he's getting.