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

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.

Copyright

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.

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* 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.