Fantastic Metropolis

Always a safe bet for a title, Watson’s third novel, The Martian Inca (1977) is less exultant. Indeed, there is a rather depressing conclusion to this story of a viral activator in the soil of the red planet. Strangely, Watson is not afraid to venture into outer-space, a realm whose borders have been largely closed to ‘inner-space’ authors. Watson is a convincing psycho-raconteur, intrigued by mythology, ecology and ethology. Yet he thinks nothing of escaping Earth’s gravity for a jaunt or three. A refreshing heretic, he has been known to venture into the chills between stars, galaxies and universes.

In this respect, he is surely the perfect bridge between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ camps of SF. If Delany and Bear ever had a love-child (after suitable surgery and coaching in Tantra) then it would develop into a thing not unlike Watson. But he rarely seeks to belittle the reader with his erudition. The Martian Inca can be read for the ‘story’ as well as for the astonishing ideas. This is less true of his first two novels. It is not important: Watson returned to the format of The Embedding with greater narrative skill in the dazzling Miracle Visitors (1978). Before this tour de force came the transitionary work which made his name as a character writer as well as an intellectual experimenter.

Alien Embassy (1977) is the sympathetic story of Lila Makindi in a future threatened by a sinister alien entity known as the ‘Starbeast’. The Earth government, reluctant to inform the people of their danger, has set up BARDO, an organisation to recruit adepts capable of weaving a protective net around Earth. Lila, who becomes a flier for BARDO, soon realises that her new job is not quite what it seems. A complex plot and chilling dénouement make this a typical Watson novel. The sheer quality of the writing, however, lifts the work into some other stratosphere. Few better SF novels were published in the ’70s. It ranks with Moorcock’s ‘Dancers at the End of Time’ sequence and Aldiss’ The Eighty-Minute Hour as perfect fusions of stunning ideas and shimmering prose. Indeed, Alien Embassy can be seen as the epitome of Watson’s first period.

Miracle Visitors is a match for Alien Embassy, although none of the main characters are as engaging as Lila. With his initial enthusiasm for the mechanics of transcendence beginning to be tempered by an humanistic concern for the consequences of such change, Watson’s auctorial depth is as great as his width. This book is often lauded as worthy of Philip K. Dick at his finest. There is truth in the comparison. But Watson has a more academic approach to his material and stronger integrity of prose. Miracle Visitors bravely takes the UFO experience as a starting point, examining the phenomenon in terms of post-Jungian psychology. There are a number of malleable realities: the deadpan scene which details a trip to the moon in a Ford Thunderbird proves the case that SF is the truest literary form of the 20th Century, able to deal with issues that mainstream methods can barely dream about. The relationship of a man to the contents of his own head has never been handled with such bravura.

A sort of companion book to Miracle Visitors, the lesser God’s World (1979) was absurdly marketed as his “first novel of outer space.” Again a female main character, Amy Dove, sets the scene for some highly amusing religious quackery: a planet orbiting the star 82 Eridani is home to a culture partly in, and partly out of, Heaven. This year also saw publication of a peculiar article (one among many) entitled ‘Some Sufist Insights into the Nature of Inexplicable Events’. It is a pity Watson does not look the dervish part; perhaps it is enough to spin tales and make reader’s heads whirl.

Despite these wondrous growths, Watson did not hit his real stride until the ’80s. Short stories continued to fill magazines and original anthologies; articles and non-fiction books for children (the former primarily about SF, the latter about Japan) were published at an ever accelerating pace; schemes for increasingly ambitious novels were drawn up. In 1981, Watson edited Pictures at an Exhibition, an obscure set of tales by competent and incompetent authors based on paintings, published in Cardiff. This was perhaps a sort of coda to the artistic license of his first true fantasy novel, The Gardens of Delight (1980). Anyone who has lingered over Hieronymus Bosch’s gruesome allegory will applaud the rationale behind this tale. An unprecedented malfunction ensures that a spaceship lands inside the infamous painting.

A collaboration with Michael Bishop yielded Under Heaven’s Bridge (1981). The same year also brought Deathhunter, a more sprightly piece of writing. The Bishop collaboration worked because the two authors concentrated on issues common to both. Deathhunter heralded the second major phase of Watson’s career: the light touch. There is comedy here, and not the entirely dark humour of stories such as ‘Nightmares’ or ‘The Call of the Wild: The Dog-Flea Version’, written around the same time. Deathhunter takes the all too familiar set-up of a future utopia based on euthanasia and subverts it with sardonic rigour. Were it not for the fact that his next novel is even more suitable for the purpose, this one would make the best introduction to his work.