#144 Beating the odds: The Grand Wheel (1977) by Barrington J. Bayley

In which life, the universe, and everything are just a game

In his 1976 novel The Garments of Caean, Barrington J. Bayley applied his unique approach to a space opera centred on clothes with strange powers. For his next trick, as critic Rhys Hughes put it, "having swept through a stellar Savile Row", Bayley "turned his sights on Monte Carlo". The Grand Wheel is another odd space adventure, in which its gambler protagonist infiltrates an organisation that might be willing to risk the future of the human species on the turn of a card.

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Transcript

Cheyne Scarne is a complicated man. He is a professional gambler, who plies his trade in the many casinos and saloons of the solar system and beyond. He is also a professor of randomatics, a new science of chance and probability. Unfortunately, he has another vocation: he is an unwilling spy for the state.

The Grand Wheel is the eighth novel by the underrated British SF writer Barrington J. Bayley. It is another of the author's space operas with a difference - this time, the themes are gambling and probability. Cheyne Scarne is caught between multiple factions in a civilisation on the brink of disaster - all of them increasingly aware of a dizzying realm of mathematics that undergirds reality.

The turn of a friendly card

The novel opens on Io, one of Saturn's moons which has been made habitable by the installation of a small artificial sun. Scarne is there in his capacity as an unwilling agent of the Legitimacy, the dominant power in human space. To ensure his compliance, their intelligence agency has forcibly addicted him to a drug that only they can supply.

Scarne is forced to infiltrate the Grand Wheel, a massive interstellar gambling syndicate which rivals the Legitimacy in strength and holds many worlds in its sway - not least Earth. While the Legitimacy is obsessed by order and predictability, the Grand Wheel views everything as a grandiose game of chance.

While Scarne attempts to decide who to trust, the whole of human space is threatened by the Hadranics, a formidable and warlike alien race. Humankind’s only defence against this threat is the Cave, a region of space prone to devastating supernovae. Scarne must try to recover equations that could weaponise luck, Legitimacy scientists stumble on a device that could control the destiny of stars, and the Grand Wheel might be about to gamble the existence of the species on the turn of a card…

Cheyne of influence

It has been suggested that The Grand Wheel was an inspiration for a much better known, later novel - The Player of Games (1988) by Iain M. Banks. Certainly the similarities are very real. In both novels, a prodigious game-player is recruited by the state to infiltrate another society which prizes game-playing above all else, and uses gambling success to determine hierarchy. 

A smaller part of Bayley’s novel seems to have been a clear inspiration on another British SF icon - the setting of Alastair Reynolds’ Chasm City (2001) was surely inspired by a section of The Grand Wheel in which Scarne visits a city called Chasm which is suspended around and over a vast abyss. Reynolds has stated that Bayley’s earlier book The Soul of the Robot (1974) was an influence on his novel House of Suns (2008). 

Number theory

The Grand Wheel is first and foremost an offbeat SF adventure with Bayley's usual strange touches. The basic template is that of an interstellar spy story, as Scarne's initial mission is to recover a set of equations which the Legitimacy believe the Grand Wheel have in their possession. These equations would define luck as a manipulable force of nature, subject to human exploitation.

This is one of Bayley's trademark wild ideas, the kind of “alternative science” which often provides part of the plot for his novels. The Grand Wheel posits the existence of a realm of pure mathematics, which exists alongside and undergirds the observable universe. This has some similarities with the “temporal substratum”, a chaotic realm of pure time in Bayley's earlier novel The Fall of Chronopolis (1974). 

Relatedly, the novel also explores the concept of probability, with which Scarne's invented field of “randomatics” is concerned. Legitimacy scientists on an isolated desert world discover an ancient alien machine which appears able to manipulate probability, with the effect of altering the destiny of nearby stars. Bayley’s plot feels a bit scattered, and never quite resolves into a satisfying climax - despite the promise of the fate of the Earth being decided over the course of a card game with aliens.

The gambling-themed The Grand Wheel was Bayley’s follow-up to his excellent clothes-themed novel The Garments of Caean - as critic Rhys Hughes put it in 1998, "having swept through a stellar Savile Row, Bayley turned his sights on Monte Carlo”. While Bayley’s eighth novel is neither as coherent nor as enjoyably odd as Caean, it will do enough to satisfy fans of his work.