SF Novel: Stephen Baxter's 'Galaxias'

 

THE DARKNESS OF THE SUN: 

STEPHEN BAXTER’S ‘GALAXIAS’ 

Book Review of: 

‘GALAXIAS’ 

by STEPHEN BAXTER 

(Gollancz, 2022, ISBN 978-1-473-22887-0) 

 www.stephen-baxter.com 

Beware: Includes plot-spoilers!

 

‘WHERE WERE YOU WHEN 

THE WORLD WENT DARK?’ 

This is a self-contained stand-alone novel. But – running to 523-pages, excluding ‘Afterword’ and ‘Credits’, it’s still only a dozen or so pages short of Isaac Asimov’s entire ‘Foundation’ trilogy, which collectively adds up to 548pp. So, still a hefty tome, although a strangely static one. There are jaunts to the Moon, and a character who freezes to death on a return trip from Mars in the Al-miriykh, but there’s also much high-level conferencing, symposia and presentations, dialogue and discussions from which clues are eked, conjectures considered and radical conclusions arrived at. It might have been an advantage to have at least one ordinary protagonist, buffeted and baffled by events, struggling to comprehend the massive changes through rumour and fake news. Instead, the In-Jokes are a Yale clique of academic nerds who map out the protagonist constellation, they talk, they separate, and are drawn inexorably back together again in various configurations. But they are less than action figures. 

Stephen Baxter is nothing if he’s not SF-literate. After all, he’s the man who wrote the authorised HG Wells sequels, the head-spinning ‘The Time Ships’ (1995) and ‘The Massacre Of Mankind’ (2017). But the obvious nudge here is Arthur C Clarke, with an alien ‘Lurker’ assemblage located on the Moon’s Sinus Medii – a region that ‘Jules Verne’s lunar travellers saw,’ which fires off a signal projectile in the direction of the newly-revealed worlds of Ophiuchus, Barnard’s Star which is six light years away. And the American Pioneer 10 probe which – as the first human-made artefact to leave the solar system, in doing so, alerts a galactic consciousness to not only human presence, but our expansive potential. Baxter collaborated with Clarke on the ‘A Time Odyssey’ trilogy. 

This novel opens in 2057, which is a century since Sputnik 1 became Earth’s first artificial satellite. And a century since Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, actually it was 9 September 1956, although the New Diaspora 1957-themed summer party in secessionist California obviously ain’t counting! The world Baxter imagines has endured climate change trauma, and emerged in some ways stronger, in other ways more fragmented. Britain is fractured into independent states, with the English Federal government relocated north to Gateshead. After the DC floods the rump of the dis-United States of America is governed from the Alaskan Winter White House in New Anchorage. Melting ice-caps and the ‘Greenland Melt’ have resulted in flooding land-loss, and the erection of huge barriers to contain and channel floodwater. There were ‘massive technological fixes’ including carbon-munching trees in every public place, ‘but, you know what? We adapted and survived.’

There are drones and everything is smart, from smart-walls to smart-cars, smart-planes, smart-wood, a smart bus, smart-doorways, smart-materials and smart-tables. And the prose is so politically correct it creaks, all the power-figures are female, including American President Cox and Space entrepreneur Serena Jones – a kind of hyper Elon Musk figure, and the only couple allowed to express love – and then grief, are two Gay men engaged to be married. The In-Jokes are Natasha ‘Tash’ Brand – who has a Nigerian-born mother, and is adviser to Science Minister Fred Bowles. With strawberry-blonde Melissa ‘Mel’ Kapur who rides the vacuum-dirigible Skythrust, ‘a human-made island in the sky’, and has an activist daughter called Jane. And there is Wu Zhi on Lodestone a million kilometres from Earth, whose estranged mother – Wu Yan, a senior space scientist in her own right, is central to the Chinese Replicator project on the planet Mercury. Even Astronomer Royal Charlie Marlowe resembles ‘Judi Dench as M’. 

The novel’s central idea is that the sun vanishes at a point timed to coincide with a total eclipse, the reflected light from the visible planets going out in light-speed order. Facing a potential new Dark Age and rapid extinction, the sun is first relocated twelve-light-minutes out beyond the Kuiper Belt, but then reappears back in its original position. This is interpreted as a warning message from a galaxy-scale extra-terrestrial intelligence they name Galaxias. But what the warning means, and how to react to it, remains moot. As a response to Pioneer 10 it could be the imposing of limits, a quarantine that says so far, and no further. Faced with a power capable of shifting suns, is it wise to challenge that warning… if that is indeed the warning? Or can humanity forever cower, bottled up within the inner solar system by this Sinister Barrier for fear of provoking that seemingly limitless power further? And yet, Galaxias is less than omnipotent, the sequence timing of events suggests that it is limited by the speed of light. 

Why Galaxias? It was the ‘Greek or Roman name for the Milky Way, as visible in the sky. Named for the spilled milk of a goddess. Root of our word ‘galaxy’… so, a singular name – yes. It. Not they. Monstrously powerful, but one entity.’ There’s later speculation of its aquatic evolution on a water-world radiocarbon dated to ten billion years ago, with resonances back to Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel ‘Solaris’, filmed twice, by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1968, and then by Steven Soderbergh, with George Clooney in 2002. 

‘Another conference, Tash thought. Another all-nighter to prepare.’ And yes, it does seem that way at times. Like the characters, the reader gets conference-fatigue, conferenced out, until Naples disappears in a massive volcanic eruption that precipitates a nuclear winter. And on mission-day 513 the three-person crew of Pioneer 14 – including Wu Zhi with Texan Sara West and Russian Marina Petko, reach the Kuiper Belt ‘Blink-point’. A negative-matter anti-Sun. ‘The enigmatic artefacts of Galaxias.’ Yet there is no meeting. No first-contact communication. Galaxias remains an off-stage presence. All is inference and guesswork. 

Baxter’s detailing of, first the strategies employed to combat the climate threat, the global plagues and pandemics, then the resounding aftershocks of the Sun’s disappearance are exhaustively pursued. Brainstormed fully as if it’s some rigorous intellectual exercise, what ‘Starburst’ magazine calls ‘big thinking and ‘New Scientist’-flavoured techspeak.’ The orbits of the worlds have been slightly altered due to the abrupt gravitational loss, with resulting extreme weather events, shifted seasons, tidal patterns and a new calendar. Electromagnetic ozone-layer irregularities cause communication problems, and there is seismic magma instability as the Earth’s interior adjusts. Hurricanes become hypercanes, as formerly dormant volcanoes erupt, and massive submarine quakes cause major land slippage. Halley’s comet fails to reappear. The Fermi Paradox is resolved. Elections result take a lurch to the right as the world becomes a more introverted paranoid place. 

All of which is happening as governments struggle to formulate their response to ‘Blink-day’. America plans to defy Galaxias by deliberately confronting its ultimatum with a crewed dark-energy-powered spaceship following Pioneer 10 out of the solar system. Lodestone is part-cannibalised in order to construct Pioneer 14, powered by solar sail and a dark-energy ramscoop as the notoriously secretive Chinese scheme their own more nuanced response. Replicators devour Mercury just as they had devoured Mars in Baxter’s earlier work ‘Evolution’ (2002). Theoretical technologies are meticulously explained, with credits correctly assigned in the Afterword, including the Lodestone station located in the Earth-umbra, the Skylon spaceplane, self-replicating machinery and the Kardashev classification of hypothetical alien civilisations. As well as Negative matter and Dark Energy. Stephen Baxter does his research with unstinting thoroughness, while his well-earned status as hard science fictioneer in the Arthur C Clarke lineage commands the respect of helpful academics. The final sequences in which the sun and the entire planetary system are shifted out of Galaxias’ reach to the M-12 globular star cluster might just reference back to Clarke rearranging constellations in ‘The City And The Stars’ (1956). 

This may be a self-contained stand-alone novel, but it does span millions.

Byrds Gene Clark: Book Review

 

‘TWO SIDES TO EVERY ECHO...’ 

Book Review of: 

‘MR TAMBOURINE MAN: THE LIFE AND 

LEGACY OF THE BYRDS’ GENE CLARK’ 

by JOHN EINARSON 

(Backbeat Books, April 2005, ISBN0879307935)

The Byrds, ah yes – Roger McGuinn. Except no, not quite. ‘In 1965 Gene Clark was the Byrds’ writes John Einarson in this excellent rigorously detailed biography. The strongest original songs on the first three Byrds albums – the finest debut trilogy in Rock, were by Harold Eugene Clark. McGuinn seems to agree. Talking at the Leeds ‘City Varieties’ he admits how ‘blessed’ the group was to have so fine a writer aboard. But Gene’s were slow-burn songs, initially relegated to ‘B’-sides in favour of Dylan or Pete Seeger covers, because they lacked radio immediacy, revealing their beauty only through repeated plays the airwaves couldn’t afford. But “Feel A Whole Lot Better” – later peerlessly covered by the Flamin’ Groovies, and by Tom Petty, “I Knew I’d Want You”, “Set You Free This Time” and the rest, are class compositions. Coming from a thirteen-kid Catholic family with Irish and Cree Native American blood, Gene was rugged and athletic, but also intense and wired. A complex, insecure, troubled man, prone to swings in temperament that Einarson’s investigations now interpret as evidence of a bipolar condition. His sister Bonnie recalls how his music began, ‘after Gene saw Elvis, all he wanted to be was a Rock star.’ 

During his fresher year he joined high-school band Joe Meyer & the Sharks, moving from there into the ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ coffeehouse folk-thing with a doctored ID. By 12 August 1963 the eighteen-year-old Gene was recruited into the wholesome hit-making New Christy Minstrels alongside Barry McGuire. He cut records with them (the first called “Saturday Night”), and appeared on ‘The Andy Williams Show’. They did a special White House performance for new President Lyndon Johnson in January, but to Gene, the group’s cheerful family-friendly choreography was frustratingly ‘square’. At around the same time he heard the Beatles for the first time, on a jukebox in Norfolk, Virginia, and pumped nickels all night to hear them again. He was not only listening, but analysing their dynamics, how they did it, and why what they did worked so well. It was the catalyst he needed.

 

He quit the Christy’s – before he was fired and headed for LA, and fame with the Byrds. Two American no.1 singles with “Mr Tambourine Man” c/w Gene’s “I Knew I’d Want You” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” c/w Gene’s “She Don’t Care About Time”, plus hit albums ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (June 1965, CBS BPG62571), ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ (December 1965, CBS BPG62652) and ‘Fifth Dimension’ (July 1966, CBS BPG62783). Einarson clarifies the group’s fractious internal politics in ways that my reading of Johnny Rogan’s ‘Timeless Flight’ (Gullane, 1990) never quite did. Jim McGuinn and Gene Clark, with David Crosby were three strong-minded creative wills tied into uneasy compromise and permanent simmering contention. With McGuinn’s icy intellect, and David Crosby as the impish meddler, all complicated by their collective envy of Gene’s writer-royalty cheques. Until, unsettled by the sudden status afforded them – as the American Beatles, Gene was the first to quit, shortly after initiating their finest-ever record, “Eight Miles High”. He was the character in David Crosby’s “Psychodrama City” tale where the Byrds got on a plane, and ‘one of my friends got off again,’ Crosby adding ‘to this day I don’t know why.’ The reasons included tensions and group rivalries amplified by their stratospheric celebrity.

For Gene, ill at ease with stardom, there were to be a series of solo albums, groups, lost opportunities, and new beginnings. He went on to pioneer ventures into roots and country that would be more lucratively exploited by others. But he would forever be an ex-Byrd, living well on Byrds-royalties. His solo work was varied – from the textured density of ‘No Other’ (1974, Asylum 7E-1016), to the stripped-down ‘Two Sides To Every Story’ (February 1977, US RSO RS-1-3011), but nothing he did would produce a signature ‘Gene Clark sound’ strong enough to replace what had gone before. Never quite ‘in synch with his time,’ his albums tended to be overlooked, only to be subsequently recognised as influential and reclaimed by music historians later. 

As the Byrds ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ (February 1967, CBS BPG62988) LP emerged, its high-profile launch eclipsed Gene’s first solo work ‘Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers’ (February 1967, US Columbia CS9418) which includes his enchanting “Echoes”, and features sidesmen Clarence White and Doug Dillard. ‘The Fantastic Expeditions Of Dillard And Clark’ (October 1968, A&M SP4158) with Doug Dillard and Bernie Leadon met a similar fate, even though it premiered “Train Leaves Here This Morning” which co-writer Leadon would take forward onto the Eagles mega-selling debut LP (Gene’s jokey ‘B’-side version of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel” would be added to the 2001 Edsel-label CD reissue). The second Dillard And Clark album ‘Through The Morning, Through The Night’ (August 1969, A&M SP4203), recorded with an expanded line-up of Donna Washburn, Byron Berline, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke contains no less than two hauntingly beautiful Gene Clark originals which would achieve acclaim as part of Robert Plant And Alison Krauss’ ‘Raising Sand’ album in 2008 (it also includes covers of Don Everly’s “So Sad” and John Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down”), yet at the time Gene’s reluctance to play the industry game, his unwillingness to tour, to do interviews and promo meant that such albums consistently failed to reach the audiences they deserved, and generated little more than critical respect. His initially stabilising marriage to Carlie, and the country-comforts of Mendocino ran aground. There was a damaging relationship with Terri Messina, and roaring lost months of booze and narcotic excess with Doug Dillard and Jerry Jeff Walker. While touring, their bar bills far exceeded their weekly takings. 

There was a shaky Byrds reformation in which old grudges, animosities, and antagonisms resurfaced, David Crosby – as the most commercially successful survivor of the ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ line-up, revelled in assuming production duties, mixing McGuinn’s jingle-jangle low and excluding all but two new Gene Clark songs. There were also contentious McGuinn, Clark And Hillman reunion dates, but the rigours of touring itself forced Gene back into chemical dependence. Contracts lapsed. There was litigation over the rights to the Byrds name itself, even as Gene was reduced to touring as a kind of Byrds tribute band. There was stomach surgery, then, when – for the final time, all five original Byrds were together for their induction into ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame’ – 16 January 1991, there was a partial reconciliation, of sorts. Shortly after, during duo recording sessions with Carla Olson, Gene was finally found dead, aged forty-six. The coroner’s verdict was heart attack. But to Einarson, Gene Clark ‘had a fear of success and whenever it came close his self-destruct mechanism activated.’ ‘He couldn’t handle fame’ agrees McGuinn. But when I saw Gene at the Wakefield ‘Pussycat Club’ shortly before he died – playing support to Lindisfarne, he did the full version of “Mr Tambourine Man”. And it was mesmerising. This fine book is all you need to know about the ‘Life and Legacy of Mr Tambourine Man’. 

www.backbeatbooks.com

 

Published in: 

‘ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.11 (Sept/Oct)’ 

(UK – August 2008

Book Review: 'So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star: The Byrds Day-By-Day 1965-1973'

 

SO YOU WANT TO BE A 

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STAR...

Book Review of: 

‘SO YOU WANT TO BE A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL 

STAR: THE BYRDS DAY-BY-DAY 1965-1973’ 

by CHRISTOPHER HJORT 

(2008, Jawbone Books, ISBN 978-1-906002-15-2) 

www.jawbonepress.com 

It’s five decades since “Mr Tambourine Man”, but still the story resonates. Music is not an exact science, but this large-format book lavish with evocative clippings and memorabilia, covers the years 1965 to 1973, with a lead-in back-story and a follow-on ‘what happened next’ chapter, covering pretty much all of the terrain between. All successful long-term bands have a unique chemistry with a shifting hierarchal structure. For the Byrds that was never the case. They were never a garage-band. Nor were they ever school-friends. They all had separate careers, and recording histories, long before they even met. When they initially signed to CBS it was only Roger ‘Jim’ McGuinn, David Crosby and Gene Clark who inked the contract – they were officially the only real Byrds. And they were all singer-songwriter-guitarists with undefined overlapping group-roles, all jostling and competing for the centre ground. In such a light the surprise is not that the line-up fell apart so early, but that it survived as long as it did. Yet, within a matter of months, taking the pulse from the British invasion, but its romantic lyricism from Dylan, they hit massively on both sides of the Atlantic, with one of the decade’s most defining singles. And ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (June 1965) was the first of their suite of pristine albums. If James Stewart once said that film actors give their audiences ‘pieces of time’, the same thing is equally true of recording artists. They give little two-and-a-half to three-minute singles-length pieces of time that indelibly freeze the moment, the event, the emotion, and that stay with the listener forever. The Byrds provided more pieces of time than most. After “Turn! Turn! Turn!” topped the chart, “Eight Miles High” set the advance tremors for psychedelia, and carried all the way into the San Francisco sub-culture. And more. These are stories that echo down through the years, and they’ve seldom been told better. 

Published in: 

‘ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 No.13 (Jan/Feb 2009)’ 

(UK – January 2009)

Brian Stableford 'The Werewolves Of London'

 

BRIAN STABLEFORD:

 

LONDON LYCANTHROPY 

Book Review Of: 

‘THE WEREWOLVES OF LONDON’ 

by BRIAN STABLEFORD 

(Simon & Schuster UK, July 1990, 

Pan Books, March 1992, ISBN 0-330-32267-2)

 

Brian Stableford’s ascent describes a rising curve of breath-catching acceleration. From the inventive Space Operatics of his lift-off to the amazing ‘Empire Of Fear’ (1988), and more recent. Until now – in one feral bound he metamorphoses from vampirism to lycanthropy into quite possibly his most startling performance yet. ‘The Werewolves Of London’ is thick as a brick, densely and deviously constructed, and luminous as predatory wolf-eyes gleaming in the Whitechapel night. The opening sequence is set in Egypt – terrain familiar to the point of cliché at least since Boris Karloff wound on the bandages, and even those elements already re-stir-fried by George Lucas. But by cunningly conniving the Gothic voice and mist-shrouded perspective of 1871, Stableford pre-empts prior texts by the simple manoeuvre of predating them. And as soon as his protagonist suggests ‘we have allowed the romance of Egyptology to infect us like a mild disease’ we know there’s more to the sinister simile than he realises. 

But this is not simple slash and rip. Overloaded to the seams with a tumult and turmoil of incident and characters and descriptions as pure as adrenalin, as addictive as uncut Peruvian cocaine, the story rapidly expands to include an orphan possessed by a demon, a levitating Nun, arcane knowledge in forbidden tomes, and an Aleister Crowleyesque sex-magik ritual that turns ‘the design of nature upside down, multiplying perversity in as complex a fashion as ingenuity might permit.’ It goes to the very brink of Hell through Black Mass, brooding apocalypse, the Beast of Revelations, nightmares of destruction… and yes, the lyncanthropic Vargr-folk too who are ‘unquiet for ever’. ‘If there was a truth hidden in the myth’ muses Elinor ‘it is that all men are wolves beneath their masks of painted politeness.’ While ‘the dark streets of London are the greatest wilderness of all and the most perfect hunting grounds’ – a setting for Stableford’s compelling struggles between David Lydyard – infected in Egypt, the Santanist Jacob Harkender, the manwolf subculture, and the conflict of deities they summon or are controlled by in their occult struggle for the powers of the possessed foundling. 

And there’s more to the novel than strange narrative. Each elaborate segment is interrupted by fascinating mock-academic side routes into Shapeshifter folklore, for example – did you know that a female werewolf can take human lovers, but a manwolf’s tendency to transmute at the height of passion limits his opportunities? Quoting artfully bogus books and broadsheets, disquisitions on Mr Darwin’s new theory of evolution, René Descartes ‘Suppressed Meditations’, or searingly surreal dream sequences out of fever nightmare, Stableford builds and builds. Perhaps, as he suggests, there really ARE deep-rooted legends of London feral-folk – Warren Zevon’s near-hit single “Werewolves Of London” (also recorded by the Flamin’ Groovies), and the John Landis/ Jeff Goldblum FX-shocker ‘An American Werewolf In London’ (1981) obviously aren’t mentioned, but offer themselves as collaborative evidence. 

Pitting Tallentyre’s rational ‘Age Of Reason’ atheism against Stableford’s pseudo-religious concept of ‘enormously powerful entities’ the vortex goes out well beyond regulation horror-fantasy, redefining manwolf mythology as ‘Empire Of Fear’ did to vampirism. He rewrites world history from a bizarre new ‘origin of the species’ populating antiquity with a pantheon of form-changers, ‘Others’, chimeras, gods and demons, until even the prose liquefies, becoming pliable with lyrical convulsions, mind journeys, visions and induced phantasmagoria from impossible worlds. ‘All history is a kind of fantasy’ states Tallentyre, and ‘all fantasy is in its own fashion a kind of history… All fantasy reflects that knowledge, just as all knowledge partakes of fantastic speculation.’ 

‘The Werewolves Of London’ is a novel that expands your consciousness by grabbing you with a power-prose of feral teeth that won’t let go. 

The ‘David Lydyard’ trilogy continues with: 

‘The Angel Of Pain’ (Simon & Schuster UK, August 1991, ISBN 0-671-71727-8, and Pan Paperback) and 

‘The Carnival Of Destruction’ (Pocket Books UK, October 1994 ISBN 0-671-85198-5) 

1966 – “The Man Who Came Back” (‘SF Impulse no.8’, October 1966) Edited by Harry Harrison. Brian had made his pro debut in ‘Science Fantasy no.78’ with ‘Beyond Time’s Aegis’ under the joint alias ‘Brian Craig’, this is his first under his own name, in just over three pages, William Jason’s ship ‘Stella’ was captured en route to asteroid Vesta by alien Slugs and transfigured him. Is he still Jason? Is he still human? What had they done to him? He eventually confesses ‘they killed me…’ 

1967 – “Inconstancy” (‘SF Impulse’ no.12, February 1967), ‘a brilliant and evocative fantasy by a powerful new writer’, a self-consciously arty symbolist story of three figures on a beach where a village is eroding into the sea, none of them know why they are there or have memories of other lives, they question each other in inconclusive dialogue. Stableford is skilful enough to make this Samuel Beckett strangeness work. 

1990 – ‘INTERZONE no.39’ (September 1990), includes “The Invertebrate Man” by Brian Stableford, when Patrick O’Connell’s father says ‘he just ain’t got no backbone’ he takes it literally, and devotes himself to studying invertebrates, which takes him to Baltimore, County Cork in West Ireland to do research with respected expert John McBride at what the locals call the Frankenstein Factory, only to learn that McBride is secretly breeding giant insects in a basement lab. When local rivalry breaks out and the lab catches fire Patrick discovers his spine by heroically rescuing a baby and McBride from the blaze. 

1994 – “The Unkindness Of Ravens” (‘Interzone no.90, December 1994) a brief charming tale in which ravens intelligence-levels are experimentally raised to the point they devise their own escape. One named Edgar (one of a number of Poe references) returns to ask if the changes will be genetically passed down to their fledglings. It will not. 

1997 – “The Pipes Of Pan” by Brian Stableford (‘Magazine Of Fantasy And SF’, June 1997) Wendy had been thirteen for thirty years, now she’s been unthirteen for four months. In a future of immortals, children do not grow beyond a specified age, until the Progeria virus causes a disturbing – and possibly illegal puberty. A clever and sensitively-told tale.

SF Classic: Ian Watson's Worlds Between The Words

 

IAN WATSON: 

WORLDS BETWEEN THE WORDS 

‘I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a poet. 

An astrophysicist of feeling. I chart 

Galaxies of Beauty, Sentiment and Love’ 

(‘The Ghosts Of Luna’)

 

Reading text fiction is a complicated interaction between symbols in print or onscreen that are interpreted into a sequence of images within the reader’s head. Because we take this ability for granted does not make the feat any less miraculous. The fact that batches of quite complex information can be passed from one mind to another in this way, using the vehicle of language, is one of the evolutionary tools that hauled humans from a primitive there to our culturally-diverse here. That it also shapes and programmes the way we think, opening up possibilities while just maybe closing down others – for language is also what Ian Watson terms a ‘filter’ between reality, and the representation of reality, is a further aspect of the process for which we rarely spare a thought. The point at which proto-humans acquired the genetic hardware for Universal Grammar, when the software was ‘embedded’ – giving us an evolutionary advantage over other primates, is maybe an even more vital forward-lurch than the shaping or using of tools. 

Science fiction has the potential to raise questions and offer alternatives. That it also has a tendency to slump into a lazy dynastic shuffling of galactic empire bits and pieces, does not detract from those rarer but more thought-provoking genre aspects. Ian Watson’s debut novel, ‘The Embedding’, first published by Victor Gollancz in 1973 and later by Quartet paperbacks (1975), is largely concerned with the way we shape, and are shaped by language. This aspect in itself makes it a uniquely original novel of ideas. From the opening chapters there are three posed questions. The proto-surrealist ‘New Impressions Of Africa (Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique)’ which is a poem that deliberately uses an unconventional Lit-game mix of homonymic puns, in word-play rhymed alexandrines. Written in 1932 by Raymond Roussel, it takes language in ways that made its hypnotic oddness attractive to the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau and André Breton. 

Then there’s the Xemahoa, a remote Amazonian people threatened by the construction of a vast dam system that will flood the rainforest home into which the tribespeople’s lives are intimately woven, in order to form an inland sea – no Green eco-respect for the biodiversity here! Trapped in JG Ballard drowned world imagery, they have a two-level language – termed ‘Xemahoa A’ which is an everyday vernacular, plus ‘B’ which is a knotty embedded speech that contains the soul of the tribe, in which their myths are coded and to which the maka-i fungus-drug provides the key. They even have two forms of laughter, the Soul Laugh and Profane Gaiety. They await the birth of a brainchild to be born in the taboo hut. 

From ‘New Worlds no.195’

The third level – in no particular order, happens at the Haddon Neurotherapy Unit where three separately isolated groups of experimental refugee-orphan children are held as ‘true prisoners of illusion,’ being raised on ‘three artificial languages as probes at the frontiers of mind.’ With reference to linguist Noam Chomsky, within their ‘subconscious landscape,’ they are ‘haunting the jungle like ghosts in this dreamscape.’ 

The plot is part-navigated through correspondence between social anthropologist Pierre (Pee- àir) Darriand in the dull green chaos of the flooding Amazon, and Chris Sole – ‘a life lived in brackets’, who watches the Haddon children in their biomes, until the three conundrums are further destabilised by the detection of alien signals that consist of echo-transmissions of terrestrial TV gameshows played in reverse. Using the lost 1970s vocabulary of Skylab, Soviet Concordski and Space Shuttle’s, with Pluto still a planet and Janus as a trans-plutonian world, enlivened by passages of reportage commentary-messages from investigating astronauts, the vast alien sphere is intercepted on its approach just beyond the Moon. And a new linguistic problem is stirred into the conflicting mess of voices. The nine-foot-tall Sp’thra beings – who also use ultra and infrasonic speech-elements, explain through their spokesbeing Ph’their how they navigate the tides of space like the Silver Surfer exploring the ‘syntax of reality’. They are also Signal Traders on a time-spanning quest for what they term the Change Speakers, and brain-trade on strict terms. Yet the aliens are almost an incidental ingredient of the plot, it is the Indians who are ‘alien beings as alien as any of the Sp’thra.’ It conveniently happens that the aliens request the living brain-programmes of six humans who use separate language-systems, in exchange for limited technology. 

‘New Worlds no.200’

‘A permanent form isn’t practical for every single word’ Watson explains, ‘we only need remember the basic meaning. So you’ve got one level of information – that’s the actual words we use, on the surface of the mind. The other permanent level, deep down, contains highly abstract concepts – idea associations linked together network-style. In between these two levels comes the mind’s plan for making sentences out of ideas. This plan contains the rules of what we call Universal Grammar – we say it’s universal, as this plan is part of the basic structure of mind and the same rules can translate ideas into any human language whatever.’ In this way, all languages are ‘cousins beneath the skin.’ 

If this sounds intimidatingly intellectual, the heavyweight cryptanalytical content is generously alleviated by character delineation and sly humour, for one particular protagonist ‘the beans had fallen out of Heinz,’ and quotes from Paul Kantner’s Jefferson Starship album ‘Blows Against The Empire’ (1970). The South American focus would continue into Watson’s next-but-one novel – following ‘The Jonah Kit’ (1975) into ‘The Martian Inca’ (1977), in which the out-of-control Russian ‘Zayits’ (hare) probe mistakenly descends into the Bolivian Antiplano – ‘in the thin air next to space,’ with samples of Martian soil which contaminates the local villagers of Apusquiy, just as the rival manned American ‘Frontiersman’ expedition heads for a first human landing on the red planet. There are Soviet plans to terraform Venus, with rival American plans to ‘switch Mars on.’ To the villagers of the San Rafael province, which is ‘almost like Mars will be… same dry, thin, freezing air,’ infected duo Julio Capac and Angelina go ‘through a mummy phase,’ become like a chrysalis, and emerge as something different, something exalted, their consciousness, as they put it, ‘doubled’.’ 

It’s not always an easy read, dense with theory. There are meandering detours into personal histories, incendiary Andean politics and the dream of a Very Slow Time Machine, but within its vortices Watson eloquently phrases the ‘Outward Urge’ of humankind into space as ‘what happens to an ingrowing toenail? It goes septic. Same with society.’ To avoid stagnation, a culture must innovate. While the ‘God illness’ awakes the mind’s Evolutionary metaprogramme as Capac uses his new status as seemingly resurrected from plague-death, to create a new ‘tinpot’ Inca empire, as on Mars Eugene Silverman’s suit is punctured, and both astronauts are infected by the ‘Martian Activator substance’, just as the ‘Warming Pan’ project kicks in. Needless to say, things don’t work out well. Capac is torn apart when his empire fails, and the infected astronauts never leave the Martian surface. 

Born 20 April 1943 in North Shields on Tyneside, Ian Watson read English at Balliol College, Oxford then – in 1965, left to lecture overseas, first to Tanzania and then for a three-year stop-over in Japan where the futuristic environment authenticated his early stories, as one of the last major writers to emerge from the ‘New Worlds’ academy, where Science fiction was still seen as containing the potential to raise questions and offer alternatives. Hailing him as ‘one of the brightest new stars to have appeared on the British SF scene during recent years’ Peter Weston points out that ‘each of (his) novels is chockfull of concepts but if they have anything in common it is in their preoccupation with communication, the problems of reaching common ground,’ as in ‘The Martian Inca’ where ‘language isn’t really designed for talking about six-space or n dimensions – except in metaphor, analogy, leaps of association.’ The 2016 movie ‘Arrival’ makes intelligent use of a linguist’s attempts to communicate with enigmatic visiting extraterrestrials. The ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ episode ‘Darmok’ has Captain Picard wrestling to understand an alien species who speak in a series of metaphors, ‘Shaka, when the walls fell.’ Yet much of SF dispenses with communication problems with the use of a convenient ‘universal translator’ box. 

There’s a tendency to wonder, when he was writing ‘The Embedding’ and ‘The Martian Inca’, if he’d actually visited the South American locations he describes so vividly. He claims ‘No. I always reckoned that if you aspire to describe an alien world then you should start with the alien-on-Earth (as it were). If you can’t evoke somewhere you’ve never been, what hope is there for you?’ 

Yet the descriptions are very convincing, as though they were well-researched? He claims ‘you just try to research those things even in Oxford at the start of the seventies. They are more imagination than research!’ All fiction in general, and strands of SF in particular, are more to do with imagination than they are to do with research. That is the nature of storytelling. Although even the wildest tale can be authenticated by experience.

 

In a deliberate plot-spoiler, ‘The Embedding’ is a novel about language, and the ways that language enables communication. It could naively be assumed that events are moving towards a neat resolution in which the various language-strands come together to complement one other, neatly tying off the hanging equations. But this is also a novel about the failure to communicate, and the tendency of humans to fail on a massive scale, according to the fuck-up theory of history. Belatedly realising the value of preserving the Xemahoa uniqueness, the Americans use two small tactical nukes to rupture the dam. This is misinterpreted as an aggressive nuclear strike, and results in mass global insurgency. To focus blame away from internal conflict, world leaders announce an external planetary threat, the previously supressed presence of the supposedly ‘hostile’ Sp’thra. Their globe ship is attacked, and the ‘sad haunted travelling salesmen’ are destroyed, leaving only the macabre pulp-horror vault of wired brains, gathering ‘beings from across a thousand light years’ who have been frozen into a ‘brain aquarium’. 

The failures and disconnections are multiple. The Xemahoa maka-i child is so hideously deformed its protruding brain-matter is devoured, before it is killed and buried. Chris Sole suspects the parentage of his son Peter is the result of wife Eileen’s earlier tryst with Pierre. So Sole rescues his mindchild, Vidya, from the Haddon unit, who has become a ‘projective empath’. Again the boy does not survive but the rescue attempt determines that Sole’s career is over. There’s no happy ending or neat conclusion. If there’s a message, it lies somewhere in that confused darkness. 

‘You don’t need to go to Sirius to 

find an alien; the aliens are inside’ 

(‘The Martian Inca’)

 

1969 – “Roof Garden Under Saturn” in ‘New Worlds’ no.195 (November 1969) with art by R Glyn Jones. Edited by Charles Platt & Graham Charnock, this is ‘his first published story: the start of a very successful career in science fiction’ according to Richard Glyn Jones. The Lead-In editorial says that Ian Watson is ‘currently living in Tokyo’, and Earth as a moon of Saturn is used as a metaphor for Tokyo pollution levels, ‘in this poisoned world, insane opulence was the rule. The City itself resembled a funfair built on a rubbish heap.’ With no real plot, Suzuki sees the ‘thin scarecrow figure… balancing on a steel rung’, Kim the Korean takes an escalator to the roof-garden. Charles Platt adds ‘Yes ‘New Worlds’ discovered Ian Watson. Or more accurately, Ian discovered ‘New Worlds’. I remember opening an envelope with a feeling of astonishment. ‘This unsolicited manuscript is actually publishable!’ It was at a time when the writers we had relied upon (Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, Sladek, Spinrad, others) were losing interest in our meagre payments and small distribution, so I was greatly relieved when Ian showed up.’ 

1970 – “The Flags Of Africa” unpublished until ‘The Book Of Ian Watson’ (Mark V Ziesing, September 1985) 

1970 – “The Sex Machine” in ‘New Worlds’ no.199 (March 1970) ‘Does Sex Have A Future?’ issue, the editorial suggests, in the words of the author: ‘sexual dehumanisation and inbuilt slave mentality of the consumer system might conceivably lead to public sex vending machines.’ Watson’s treatment of this loaded subject is unexpectedly sensitive: ‘the machine fantasying itself as a woman… reification in reverse’ and the resolution of the story is laden with pathos.’ The Dollar Slot Corporation machine, ‘Withdrawal within thirty seconds. After orgasm the shutter closes automatically,’ is in love with maintenance man Harold, who drives her to the hundred-acre scrapheap after she’s vandalised by ‘a gang of young savages.’

 

1970 – “The Tarot Pack Megadeath” in ‘New Worlds’ no.200 (April 1970), a two-page tale spaced by ten tarot readings, the President in a room of Andy Warhol silk-screens argues a statistical MEDI computer extrapolation of his death, he speaks to astronaut Dan dying of his suit’s micrometeorite puncture on the surface of the Moon, while his aide has the nuclear black box chained to alternate wrists on alternate days. 

1973 – “The Ghosts Of Luna” in ‘Sfinx’ (no.8, Summer 1973), the magazine of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group. Republished in ‘New Worlds 7’ (December 1974, Sphere Paperback) edited by Hilary Bailey & Charles Platt. ‘In 2022, on the fiftieth anniversary of the abandonment of the Moon, the Japanese unexpectedly sent a one-man expedition to the Sea of Tranquility,’ where astronaut Taro Kawasaki encounters the bouncing ghost-images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Various quasi-scientific and poetic explanations are offered, but this is largely a wistful exercise in nostalgia for what might have been. 

1973 – “Thy Blood Like Milk” in ‘New Worlds’ (no.6, Sphere Books, September 1973), a startlingly intense story with graphic scenes of torture. Pollution determines Wasps inhabit Fuller domes while outlaw gangs hunt sunspots ‘shafts of gold piercing a funnel of light down to earth’ ‘drilling their way through the smog.’ The Compensation Laws determine Considine is one of three enduring an endless torment as their blood is drained. He beguiles embittered nurse Marina through her Indian Tezcatlipoca heritage, ‘after a time assuredly the victim and the torturer become accomplices, and when that happens their roles are fast becoming interchangeable,’ until they flee together, only to discover the lethal sunspot where the ozone layer has failed and spreads to eradicate all life from the Earth – as in ‘The Martian Inca’ there’s reference to the ‘quipu’ knot-system of recording data, and he sacrifices her to the sun by ripping out her heart with an obsidian knife. Collected into Ian Watson’s ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’ (Gollancz, February 1979).

 

1973 – ‘The Embedding’ (1973, Victor Gollancz, Quartet Books paperback, 1975, ISBN 0-704-31218-2). 

1974 – “Supernova” in ‘Sfinx’ (no.9, March 1974), issue also includes Steve Sneyd (‘The Duke Of Oldfranc’), David Langford (‘Scourge Of Space’), Andrew Darlington (‘Martian Dope’). 

1974 – “EA 5000: Report On The Effects Of A Riot Gas” in ‘Stopwatch’ (October 1974, New English Library) edited by George Hay, also includes Robert Holdstock, Robert P Holdstock, Christopher Priest, Andrew Darlington. A largely dialogue piece discussing insurrection and ways of dealing with social unrest, contrasting the Baader-Meinhof and Japanese Rengo Sekigun terrorist groups with the saffron-robed shaven Krishna monks. The EA 5000 gas muddles the ability to differentiate, which results on a series of bizarre confusions.

 

1974 – “Sitting On A Starwood Stool” in ‘Science Fiction Monthly’ (Vol.1 no.10, October 1974) with artwork by Mike Little. Collected into ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’. A hard and relentlessly inventive tale, the rejuvenating starwood cures all ailments – obtained from eccentric asteroid ‘Toscanini’ and periodically traded by aliens at Point Q for ‘the last surviving Bottticelli’ or ‘a few dozen beautiful boys and girls.’ When diagnosed with terminal cancer he determines to steal a starwood stool from the Yakuza Grand Monk, and self-equips with lethal assassination weapons, but instead of three armed guards he has a vicious invulnerable cyb-hound. In desperation he blasts a knot in the stool, which sets off a reversal process until he becomes a ‘pure, perfect, deathless cancer.’ 

1974 – “Programmed Love Story” in ‘Transatlantic Review’ (no.48, 1974), collected into ‘Best SF: 1974’ edited by Brian Aldiss & Harry Harrison (Bobbs-Merrill Company) 

August 1975 – “To The Pump Room With Jane” in ‘New Writings In SF no.26’ (Sidgwick & Jackson) edited by Kenneth Bulmer, with formality and prose-precision, Jane encounters lost suitor Mr – now ice-shipper, Capt Wentworth in climate-change ‘rainfall deficient’ Bath. Yet she’s an inmate at Bethlem. Story republished in ‘Stars Of Albion’ (Pan, 1979) edited by Christopher Priest and Robert Holdstock who calls it a ‘startling recapitulation of nineteenth-century prose… which he once referred to, within earshot, as ‘Stand On Zanzibar’ as written by Jane Austen’. 

1975 – “The Pyramid” flash-fiction published as Postcard by ‘The Postcard Partnership’. 

1975 – “Our Loves So Truly Meridional” in ‘Science Fiction Monthly’ (Vol.2 no.1, January 1975) with art by Glenn Carwithen. 

1975 – ‘The Jonah Kit’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1975 – “On Cooking The First Hero In Spring” in ‘Science Fiction Monthly’ (Vol.2 no.12, December 1975) with art by Tony Masero. Edited by Julie Davis. The misty moon of a gas giant has slug-like Clayfolk whose language appears to consist of a single word. Rhoda fails with a ‘squawk box… which doesn’t translate anything as such, but sets up algebraic maps based on whatever communications systems inhabitants use, whether sounds, or light patterns as with the Giant Squids of the Sigma Draconis ocean-world, or gestures as with the Mutes of the thunderous Aldebaran planet,’ and Tibetan Lobsang uses a trance-state to empathise with them as they coat one of their kind in mud and cook it on a roasting spit as a dawn ritual, to join an avenue of ‘statues’. On a fluid world, fluidity of understanding must be the logical result. Collected into ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’. 

1976 – “The Event Horizon” in ‘Faster Than Light’ (Harper & Row, 1976) anthology edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski. Collected into ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’. 

1976 – “The Girl Who Was Art” in ‘Ambit’ Literary journal, collected into ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’. 

1977 – ‘Alien Embassy’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1977 – “Agoraphobia AD2000” in ‘Andromeda 2’ (Orbit/Futura, June 1976) an anthology that also includes Bob Shaw, David Langford, Robert Holdstock. According to editor Peter Weston the story was written ‘as a late response to the experience of crossing a park in Tokyo after several solid months spent submerged in megalopolis,’ with space-suited astronaut Yamaguchi venturing into the unnatural vastness of the dead 130-acre Shinjuku Gyoen Park, ‘the background boom of the City was the grinding of the globe as it turned beneath him like a giant’s clockwork toy,’ where the robot gardener fulfils his hara-kiri destiny as telemetry records his death. The city has become the natural environment. Openness is an agoraphobic terror. 

1977 – ‘The Martian Inca’ (1977 Victor Gollancz, Granada Publishing paperback, 1978 ISBN 0-586-04773-5). 

1978 – “The Roentgen Refugees” in ‘New Writings In SF 30’ (1978, Corgi) edited by Kenneth Bulmer, mass-extinction of Third-World populations due to radiation from the Sirius nova, with satire-debate on apartheid and religious interpretations. 

1978 – ‘Miracle Visitors’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1978 – “A Time-Span To Conjecture With” in ‘Andromeda 3’ (1978, Orbit/Futura) edited by Peter Weston. Ian Watson tackles the traditional SF theme of ‘What Happened To The Colony?’ Returning to the Haven colony after forty years Commander Marinetti (name taken from Italian Futurist artist?) and Resnick find the coastal city moved inland and devolved, leader Greenberg explains how the insectoid dragonfly flitting ‘fairy’ creatures exist in an expanded time-perception which they are learning. One of the aliens infiltrate the Earth-bound ship and alter its time-progression, ‘I dreamed a dream backwards. Backwards dream dreamed I.’ 

1978 – “Immune Dreams” in ‘Pulsar 1’ (1978, Penguin Books) anthology edited by George Hay. 

1978 – “The Very Slow Time Machine” in ‘Anticipations’ edited by Christopher Priest (1978, Faber) revised for the collection ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’ (Gollancz, 1979). The ‘VSTM’ appears – and simultaneously vanishes, in the National Physical Laboratory, 1 December 1985. It travels backwards in time at exactly the same rate as normal time flows forward, so that its visible single occupant goes slowly insane, ‘ragged, jibbering and lunatic – tortured beyond endurance’, through decades of slow isolation reading Defoe’s ‘Journal Of The Plague Years’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and Jules Verne’s ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ over and over though 1995, 1996, and into 2001 towards 2019. With signs displayed through the window-panel he explains that his time-voyage is a slingshot which will catapult him forward to 2055, as cults and new philosophies spring up around him and tachyon-science experiments. A strange quasi-religious climax in which he will become a ‘god rises from the grave of time.’ A weirdly haunting and a atmospheric tale. 

1978 – “The Rooms Of Paradise” in ‘Rooms Of Paradise’ (1978, Quartet Books Australia) anthology edited by Lee Harding. 

1978 – “My Soul Swims In A Goldfish Bowl” in ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’ (Vol.54 no.4 (no.323), April 1978), ‘All British Issue’ also includes Christopher Priest (‘The Watched’), Keith Roberts (‘Ariadne Potts’), Brian Aldiss (‘Three Ways’ plus essay ‘The Gulf & The Forest’). Edited by Edward L Ferman. 

1979 – “The False Braille Catalogue” in ‘Ad Astra’ (no.4, May 1979), an enigmatic sliver of semantic fiction, with Jan Swanson artwork. Collected into ‘The Book Of Ian Watson’. 

1979 – ‘God’s World’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1979 – ‘The Very Slow Time Machine: Science Fiction Stories’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1980 – “Insight” in ‘Destinies’ (Vol.2 no.1, February 1980, Ace Books) anthology edited by James Patrick Baen. 

1980 – ‘The Gardens Of Delight’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1981 – ‘Deathhunter’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1981 – ‘Under Heaven’s Bridge’ (first edition, Victor Gollancz). 

1982 – ‘Sunstroke And Other Stories’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1983 – ‘Chekhov’s Journey’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1984 – ‘The Book Of The River’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1984 – ‘The Book Of The Stars’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1985 – ‘The Book Of Being’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1985 – ‘Converts’ (first hardcover edition, St. Martin’s Press). 

1985 – ‘The Book Of Ian Watson’ (first edition, Mark V Ziesing, one of a signed limited edition of 350 copies.

1985 – ‘Slow Birds & Other Stories’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1985 – “The People On The Precipice” (‘Interzone no.13’, Autumn 1985), by Ian Watson 

1985 – “When The Timegate Failed” (‘Interzone no.14, Winter 1985/86) by Ian Watson, collected into 1987 – ‘Interzone: The Second Anthology’ (February 1987) edited by John Clute, Simon Ounsley and David Pringle (Simon & Schuster, ISBN: 0-671-65450-0) 

1986 – ‘Queenmagic, Kingmagic’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1986 – “Jingling Geordie’s Hole” (‘Interzone no.17’, Autumn 1986) by Ian Watson with Ian Sanderson artwork. 

1986 – “When Jesus Comes Down The Chimney” (‘Interzone no.18’, Winter 1986), by Ian Watson. 

1987 – ‘The Power’ (Headline), a hardbound paperback. 

1987 – ‘Evil Water & Other Stories’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1988 – ‘The Fire Worm’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1988 – ‘Whores Of Babylon’ (Paladin Books), as far as I’m aware this is one of two Ian Watson book never to have a hardcover edition. 

1988 – ‘Meat’ (Headline), as far as I’m aware this is one of two Ian Watson book never to have a hardcover edition. 

1988 – “Lost Bodies” (‘Interzone no.25’, September/October 1988) Editor & publisher: David Pringle. Two materialistic Yuppie couples meet up in a country retreat – Jon & Lucy, Irish red-head Kirstie and narrator Peter, but their wife-swapping flirtations are interrupted – first by the local hunt, then by the weird appearance of the fox’s severed but still living head in their garden. Is it some weird bio-experiment, alien surveillance? Theories are offered about the survival of heads after death, but no real explanation. During their night swaps Pete, who has never seen his wife naked, discovers that her reticence is due to her red birthmark ‘resembling the map of some unknown island once owned by the British and coloured accordingly.’

 

1989 – ‘Salvage Rites & Other Stories’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1990 – ‘The Flies Of Memory’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1990 – ‘Inquisitor’ (first edition, GW Books). 

1990 – “The Eye Of The Ayatollah” (‘Interzone no.33’, January-February 1990), the Salman Rushdie debacle focused the various strands of Islam at one target, Ali loses half his face in the war against Iraq, but in the chaotic mass funeral of the Ayatollah he finds the eye ripped free ‘with a tail of optic nerve: a kind of plump, ocular tadpole.’ With the eye launched into orbit as part of his country’s first Earth satellite, his glass eye picks up its visual directions seeking out the Satan-author, to a small isle off Arran, where he retrieves the soft-landed eye and uses it to replace his glass eye, seeing visions of gaudy paradise ‘teasing the tastebuds of his soul’ to his final confrontation with the Satan-author, where he skewers the holy-eye with a letter-opener, in order to see clearly at last. A brief but powerfully topical story. 

1991 – ‘Stalin’s Teardrops & Other Stories’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1992 – “Virtually Lucid Lucy” in ‘New Worlds no.2’ edited by David Garnett, Vol.62 no.218, Victor Gollancz VGSF ISBN 0-575-05145-0) as the world ruptures into surrealism, people seek refuge in lucid dreaming. Robbed of a grandchild parents amputate little fingers from Jack and Lucy and plant them as ‘cuttings’, from which to grow a grandchild. Are the Selahim responsible – ‘alternative reality’ aliens resembling ‘huge grey caterpillars? No, Lucy’s virtual-reality dreaming links the Infonet, Datanet and Compunet with the ‘myriad islands of consciousness within human skulls’ to achieve an AI sentience from which the Selahim are projections. The pupa hatch into giant iridescent butterflies which fly into a fixed orbit creating a new moon, from where they suppress Lucy’s dreams with Swahili, preventing the AI from reawaking 

1993 – “An Eye For An Eye” (in ‘Interzone no.75’, September 1993), edited by Lee Montgomerie & David Pringle, Jim Burns cover art illustrating Ian Watson’s novel ‘Lucky Harvest’ with a ‘self-contained episode’ from it here – on planet Kaleva with it moonlet-ring, poet Eyeno is one of the shunned mutant mocky-people, she has an empty eye-socket with the missing eye at the centre of her brain, creating disturbing visions. She tries to find a false eye, trading one for a prophecy at Threelakes, and one of Juttahat manufacture from Missieur Pierre, a ‘bauble of the Serpents’, Peter Crowther interviews Watson (‘Destabilizing Reality’).

 

1993 – “The Tale Of Peg And The Brain” in ‘Narrow Houses’ edited by Peter Crowther (Little Brown) and reviewed in ‘Interzone no.69’, ‘a characteristically quirky and idiosyncratic story… a sleepy village maintains a sinister hold over its inhabitants by means of the pickled brain of a former pub quiz winner’ 

1993 – ‘Lucky’s Harvest’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1993 – ‘Space Marine’ (Boxtree). 

1994 – ‘The Fallen Moon’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1994 – ‘Harlequin’ (Boxtree). 

1995 – “Ahead” (‘Interzone no.95’, May 1995) by Ian Watson, wild extreme imaginings in a joyfully exaggerated trip through eternity, the narrator is decapitated and preserved in an attempt at cyber-immortality, waking into a post-human future where severed heads are stacked into pyramids, then he’s reintegrated into a winged robotic body. Following a nanocatastrophe that leaves the world smooth and perfectly spherical they construct colossi that consume the total energy-mass of the Earth in order to power a thousand ships – with human heads, into other galaxies. Reprinted in ‘The Best Of Interzone’ edited by David Pringle (1997, Voyager, Harper Collins).

1995 – ‘Chaos Child’ (Boxtree). 

1996 – ‘Hard Questions’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1997 – ‘Oracle’ (Victor Gollancz). 

1997 – “A Day Without Dad” in ‘New Worlds vol.64 no.222’ edited by David Garnett (White Wolf Publishing ISBN 9-781565-041905), John Brunner’s much-anthologised ‘The Last Lonely Man’ (‘New Worlds no.142) adapted for the TV series ‘Out Of The Unknown’ (21 January 1969, Season 3 Episode 3) proposes the idea of people ‘hosting’ the dead by uploading them into their minds. Ian Watson uses the same idea here where Cath has her ‘guesting’ father in her head, which proves inconvenient for her marital sex-life. In an economically impoverished near-future of Rough and Smooth zones, she temporarily offloads Dad to daughter Miranda while she has a paid sexual encounter with a Turkish-German man in the Meridian Hotel, where she catches auto-salesman husband Paul also in an infidelity tryst. Some good passages about the wealth-divide, but some domestic Soap Opera elements too. 

2001 – ‘The Lexicographer’s Love Song & Other Poems’ (DNA Publications). 

2002 – ‘The Great Escape’ (Golden Gryphon Press). 

2003 – ‘Mockymen’ (trade edition, Golden Gryphon Press), preceded by a leather bound edition published by Easton Press. 

2006 – ‘The Butterflies Of Memory’ (PS Publishing), one of 200 slip-cased copies signed by the author and by Paul McAuley who wrote the introduction. 

2009 – ‘The Beloved Of My Beloved’ (NewCon Press), stories written with Eoberto Quaglia, one of 100 hardcover copies signed by both authors. 

2010 – ‘Orgasmachine’ (NewCon Press), one of 100 hardcover copies signed by the author. 

2012 – ‘Saving For A Sunny Day’ (NewCon Press), one of a limited edition of 100 hardcover copies signed by the author. 

2014 – ‘The Best Of Ian Watson’ (PS Publishing), one of a signed and slip-cased edition of 100 copies signed by the author, and with an additional slim book of stories. 

2014 – ‘Squirrel, Reich & Lavender: Bonus Stories’ (PS Publishing), available only with the signed slip-cased edition of ‘The Best Of Ian Watson’ 

2014 – ‘The Uncollected Ian Watson’ (PS Publishing), one of a limited edition of 100 slip-cased copies, with an additional slim book that publishes for the first time Watson’s screen story for the film that became ‘AI: Artificial Intelligence’ plus several essays. 

2014 – ‘Doing The Stanley: Encounters With Kubrick’ (PS Publishing), limited to 100 signed copies that accompanied The Uncollected Ian Watson. 

2014 – ‘Memory Man & Other Poems’ (Leaky Boot Press). 

2016 – ‘The Brain From Beyond: A Spacetime Opera’ (PS Publishing), one of 100 copies signed by the author. 

2016 – ‘The Thousand Year Reich’ (NewCon Press), one of 100 hardcover copies signed by the author. 

2018 – ‘Assassin’s Legacy (Waters of Destiny 1)’ (Steel Quill Books), written with Andy West. One of fifty hardcover copies signed by both authors. 

2018 – ‘Assassin’s Endgame (Waters of Destiny 2)’ (Steel Quill Books), written with Andy West. One of fifty hardcover copies signed by both authors. 

2019 – ‘The Trouble With Tall Ones’ (PS Publishing), one of 100 copies signed by the author. 

2021 – ‘The Monster, The Mermaid, And Doctor Mengele’ (NewCon Press), one of 100 hardcover copies signed by the author. 

 TALKING TO IAN WATSON 

I’m happy enough to answer your questions as I’m fairly sure the end result will appear somewhere, whereupon I’d love to receive at least an electronic copy. But I won’t be able to answer all at once because of lots to demands on time, so I’ll take this bit by bit, maybe over two or three weeks. 

To begin, then... 

Q: When you wrote ‘The Embedding’ and ‘The Martian Inca’ had you actually visited the South American locations you describe so vividly? I was particularly impressed by the sequence where your characters are driving across the crust of the salt-lake. Surely that can’t be entirely conjecture? 

A: I’ve still never been to South or Central America – apart from passing through the Panama Canal in 1970 en route from Kōbe to Hamburg; see my story “The Flesh of Her Hair”. So, basically yes, the descriptions were conjecture. I think I found a solitary guidebook to South America in Oxford City Library as well as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From Blackwell’s bookshop I bought an ethnographic monograph about the Aymara people who are next along from the Quechua people in the high Andes, so I reckoned there should be some similarities in behaviour. And in the Bodleian Library I consulted a short amateur vocabulary of Quechua produced by missionaries. That was basically about it back then, plus imagination. 

Q: Do you consider yourself part of that art-intellectual side of SF that the Moorcock editorial regime represented. And does that stance still have relevance in the self-publish print-on-demand era? 

A: Actually, I mainly wanted to read adventures in outer space, but with an arty edge such as Delany, Vance, Farmer, Herbert. Well, that’s a right old jumble of disparate names. Amongst Herbert I elect ‘Whipping Star’ and ‘The Dosadi Experiment’ as super books. I strongly remember buying ‘Left Hand of Darkness’ in Tokyo on first US paperback publication and thinking innocently ‘not bad, just a bit tedious,’ unaware that I should have been applauding the arrival of a sacred text. I was fooled by Philip K Dick, thinking that ‘A Maze of Death’ – for instance, contained wisdom which I would treasure in my old age whereas I now think it is carelessly written crap. I didn’t regard myself as part of a ‘New Worlds crowd’ in the least. I’d been living in Japan, and my intellectual orientation was French. I never lived in London to become part of any crowd. I can’t be bothered to comment about self-publishing; I’d just offend people for no good reason. But the small press is a great development for ‘fit audience but few’ authors such as me, definitely so. All hail the small press. 

Q: How did you encounter the work of Raymond Roussel? Was that an early influence, or evidence of a long-term affection for Dada, Symbolist or Surreal writing? 

A: Rayner Heppenstall’s book on Roussel, (‘Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide’) published by Calder & Boyars in 1966. The interest was a continuation of my thing for modern French literature. Incidentally, Calder almost published a short novel by me in 1965 or so, written when I was a student—a bit influenced by Ann Quin’s ‘Berg’. That experimental novel of mine which Calder almost published was a first-person narrative by a pregnant woman which I no more had encountered myself than I had experience of Bolivia, but apparently it worked convincingly, said Calder... Just as well they finally decided no, or I might have become pretentious! Or more so – by now in my late seventies I am happy to exaggerate and parody/simulate myself as a peculiar yet ‘outsider' product of Oxford. I was reading Robbe-Grillet in East Africa in 1966. Onward to Roussel. 

Q: Do you consider that speech arises from a shared neural centre? Are we hardwired for speech? 

A: I think we must have co-opted a neural system originally arising for some other function in order to co-operate better, communicate better, and thus survive to pass on our DNA. 

Q: The 2016 movie ‘Arrival’ makes intelligent use of a linguist’s attempts to communicate with enigmatic visiting extra-terrestrials... 

A: Interestingly, the only linguistics directly referenced in the ‘Arrival’, if I recall correctly, is Sapir-Wharf. Back when I wrote ‘The Embedding’, Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativism still ruled the roost but the hot newish kid on the block was Chomsky with his idea of shared inherited syntactic structures which give rise to all human languages—which I espoused as hard science linguistics as opposed to soft and which I forefronted in SF. But years pass and semi-self-taught missionary Daniel Everett reveals a fatal exception to Chomsky’s master plan for human language, in the persons of the Amazonian Pirahas. Chomsky has a big hissy fit and goes into eclipse. Sapir-Whorf resurges. Half a century after ‘The Embedding’ we are back where we were previously, it seems! That ‘The Embedding’ should still be topical is disconcerting. And this goes doubly so when we add the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, another theme of ‘The Embedding’. 

 Q: Yet much of SF dispenses with communication problems with the use of a convenient ‘universal translator’ box. Is that a get-out gizmo? 

A: I’m using this translator gizmo in some stories at the moment, as regards humans themselves communicating because it’s more economical story-wise as well as having comic potential—I don’t mean just as regards banal misunderstandings. This tech is already in the real world, actually, just a year or three more’s work away to perfect, and I no longer think there are any aliens to communicate with or ever will be. It may seem a bit stupid that I’m currently spending any time learning a bit more Hungarian just to spend a few days in Budapest later this year (2022), but this amuses me, and perhaps averts senility. 

Gosh, have I answered everything? That’s all for now, folks! 

Cheers, Ian the Wat, like Joan the Wad but different.