Fantastic Metropolis

Ian Watson is our very own Borges, the man who can nurture bizarre ideas and train them to climb all over the genre’s walls and ceiling. There is no cleverer short-story writer working in SF today, and precious few novelists. Watson is one of those lucky surfers who rode the ’60s New Wave without being dashed on the rocks. But he is younger than his peers, and possessed of an enormous energy that makes them seem idle by comparison. He is the true professional, a writer for whom quantity and quality are not incompatible terms.

So prolific is Watson’s output that a detailed overview of his work is almost impossible in a single article. There are, however, certain categories into which sections of his oeuvre can be parcelled, if not neatly then at least conveniently. There are the horror tales, deadpan in execution; the metaphysical adventures, richly scented with Tantric symbolism; the forest of pure ideas, a resource rarely logged in genre fiction. One thing only can be stated simply: his imagination has always been good, but his prose has improved steadily.

Born in North Shields in 1943, his first published pieces were for gardening journals at age 13. Watson has a genuine love for exotic plants. Monstrous orchids often put out creepers into his fiction. But he is no affected decadent, musty as a Mirbeau, cluttering up his writing with ultra-violet prose. His work is clean, cunningly wrought but accessible. Pretentious it is not, and rarely languid or indolent.

Educated in Balliol, earning his English degree in 1963, he left the country to teach in Tanzania and Japan. These locations often figure in his stories. Combined with his predilection for female main characters, such rampant internationalism has kept his earliest work fresh. His first short-story, ‘Roof Garden Under Saturn’ (1969), was published in New Worlds at its most glorious period. It is engagingly naive, a fragile yarn. Only appearing in the magazine, it is ripe for collection. Apart from its decorative worth, it has surely the most evocative debut title in SF history.

After that, things become a little complicated. Various other short pieces followed ‘Roof Garden’ into New Worlds. ‘The Sex Machine’ (1970) was chased by ‘The Tarot Pack Megadeath’ (1970) in the penultimate issue of the magazine. These too remain uncollected. In the early ‘70’s Watson began to accelerate. Much of this stuff he obviously deems of little worth. His earliest anthologised story, the nightmarish ‘Thy Blood Like Milk’, dates from 1974 and can be found in The Very Slow Time Machine (1979), his first short-story collection.

This book demonstrates his range and power. The title story alone is too clever for its own good, a thought-experiment that loses its way into mystical abstraction. ‘Thy Blood Like Milk’ reads like a savage Zelazny, weaving cruel mythology and post-holocaust tribalism into an account of an irradiated future that is part social satire. Better still are the cooler miseries, black comedies in which the laughs and chills are one and the same. ‘My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl’ and ‘The Girl who was Art’ have a fabular quality, but are fables without morals. ‘Programmed Love Story’ is in similar vein, the Japanese flavour making the piece more alien than those set on other worlds. Of these latter, ‘The Event Horizon’ rewards careful re-reading. Neatest of all, ‘Sitting on a Starwood Stool’, an account of regeneration, offers a cynical view of spirituality. The zen is not mightier than the sword.

One of Watson’s most enduring concerns is transcendence, its timing and the means by which it is acquired. Transcendence in this case means not only the gaining of higher perception but an insight into the actual mechanics of satori. His first novel, The Embedding (1973) is a highly acclaimed triple-plotted venture into the concept of language as method of raising consciousness. In form and content there was nothing remotely like this book anywhere in the field before its publication, and there has been very little since, with the possible exception of T.J. Bass’ neglected novels and Watson’s other books.

This is not to say that it is an entirely engrossing read. At this stage, Watson was trying to pin down his remarkable ideas with a prose not quite capable of the task. A truer match between ideas and language had to wait until Alien Embassy (1977) and thereafter. The early Watson is better represented by short pieces, of which there have always been plenty. Nonetheless his second novel, The Jonah Kit (1975), is another impressive attempt at combining the rational with the metaphysical. An oceanic romp involving the whales of the world and their efforts to construct a kind of gestalt computer, a ‘Thought Star’, The Jonah Kit delights with its improbable genius. Watson is perhaps the only living exponent of serious whimsy. Ecophiles should take note: the cetacean population escapes man’s inhumanity and seeks refuge in an alternative space-time continuum.