I was born in 1943 and brought up in the North of England, a rather depressing area. Common conversational gambits would include: "My, it's treacherous today," "Ee, you're looking sick," and "Don't fly too high!" I clearly remember the newsagent's shop where I bought my first pulp sf novel (which was Antro the Life-Giver by the immortal "Jon J. Deegan"). In the window a little yellow plastic ostrich bobbed its head in and out of a glass of water all day long; and it says something about the general emptiness of the Tyneside of my childhood, and of the early 1950s for that matter, that this toy ostrich was a thing of wonder, a star attraction. Since there was little else of wonder or amazement in the vicinity, I cast up my gaze to the actual stars instead, and fantasized. Presently I moved on from the immortal Jon Deegan to even more immortal (or at least subsequently reprinted) things, namely the classics--though little did I know then that those were classics (I thought Vergil's Aeneid was) nor that I was in fact living through a Golden Age. I discovered "mature" sf books with hard backs on them, and it was obvious to me at once, finding these in the local library shelved amidst the works of Graham Greene and D. H. Lawrence, that compared with Greene or Lawrence writers with names like A. E. van Vogt or Isaac Asimov or editors called Groff Conklin were far from ordinary. Obviously they must possess alien wisdom. Yet I knew in my heart that what I must aspire to was the Greene and Lawrence sort of thing. Real literature. Mind you, Zola was a fairly weird name too; and I devoured the Rougon-Macquart novels. Perhaps I vaguely sensed that these were science fiction in disguise: fiction designed to explicate a genetic, social-science theory as colorfully and even luridly as possible.
Incidentally, for some reason I only ever laid out my pocket money on one sf magazine, a copy of Astounding Science Fiction which deeply puzzled me with a story set in hyperspace where a character stepped outside of the ship and perceived "an infinite plane." Oblivious at the time to the geometrical meaning of this, I imagined a space-vehicle distorted by hyperspace so that very long wings stretched out on either side, a momentous concept. Quite a few of my own subsequent stories have been inspired by wilfully misinterpreting some common or garden phrase, so as to turn the world upside-down and inside-out. Indeed this was a procedure used by the surrealist Raymond Roussel in concocting his stories. Roussel was to prove a great influence on my first sf novel, The Embedding, leading-in part-to it becoming prize-winner in France. Thus the strands of life unwind strangely.
I escaped Tyneside quite early, for the gilded pleasaunce of Oxford, on a scholarship to read English. (I was quite bright and hard-working at school, and had left by the time I was sixteen because there was nothing more to do. In between school and university I worked for a few ghastly weeks in the accounts office of a dockside shipping company, only kept sane by reading Gormenghast, then quit and hitch-hiked from Rotterdam to Vienna.) Oxford with its meadows, rivers, gardens, bookshops, seemed like Paradise; though it was also a trap, of indulgent pretension and aesthetic frivolity, where I happily indulged myself, and pretended . . . yet while with my right hand I turned the pages of decadent poets, with my left hand I still clutched The Voyage of the Space Beagle schizophrenically.
I was married in my second year at Oxford. Judy also came from Tyneside. A painter, whom I'd met while we were both working as Christmas temporaries in a post office, she had escaped the Northern wilderness too, in favor of St Martin's School of Art in London. My college was quite abusive about our getting married, on academic grounds; but "Sod you," said I, and went ahead and got a 1st class Honours degree. This meant that I could automatically collar a grant to do research, thus I launched into a Bachelor of Letters thesis (for the Oxford equivalent of a Master's degree) on the monumentally marginal topic of "Walter Pater related to some Nineteenth Century French writers: Stendhal, Mérimée, Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire." Still, this did give me the opportunity to read a lot of French literature in the original, something which stood me in good stead, quite unexpectedly, when I started being invited to French- speaking sf conventions later on.
While at Oxford I wrote a couple of bejewelled novellas and a pair of contemporary novels, one of them about pregnancy-bits of which resurfaced in a very different setting in Alien Embassy. However, I didn't really have a reason for writing, aside from a consuming urge to be a writer. Oscar Wilde's aunt once asked him, while he was at Oxford, "What will you be when you grow up, Oscar?" To which he replied, "A writer." "And what will you write about?" asked the aunt. "My dear aunt," said Oscar, "one doesn't write about things. One just writes." That was really me at Oxford.
I finished the thesis in 1965, and after precisely one job interview we took off with gay abandon and little money on an open-ended trip round Europe. I was vaguely dreaming of sitting writing in Tyrolean meadows, like D. H. Lawrence. Broke in Ravenna some while later, I remembered that interview, phoned and discovered that I'd become a lecturer in Literature in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. So off we went to Africa.
On the one hand this was a politically enlightening experience in a developing socialist country in the third world, amidst an "alien" ethnic culture--and with a war of liberation going on in neighboring Mozambique. It was an adventure, too, amongst elephants, lions, fossil sites, coral reefs. On the other hand the university was the ivory towers of Oxford transplanted into the tropics, so that we spent most evenings playing darts with car mechanics in town to escape the niceties of dinner parties and soirées; and East Africa was something of a cultural desert--voices were even raised in protest about West African cultural imperialism. As a junior lecturer I was rather poor (not of course compared to the Tanzanians), but Judy had a job as a commercial artist in town and won 50 gallons of petrol in an Esso painting competition, thus funding us to explore the Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai.
We left Tanzania after two years and I applied for a job in the Cameroons, was interviewed, informed that they really wanted someone with brain damage for that post, and was offered a lectureship in Tokyo instead.
We stayed three vivid and mind-blowing years in Japan, where science fiction was daily reality; and I began writing something real at last. Tokyo seemed the disaster area that sf warns about: a world of overpopulation, pollution, seismic shock, as well as being vibrant with the electronic high jinks of the 21st century. Japan was a thrilling mating of traditional culture, consumerist images and brandnames, the cybernetic cool of Buddhism, the Coney Island of Shintoism. I started writing sf as a psychological survival strategy to cope with future shock. Indeed, I hear tell (though not very loudly) that cyberpunk might stem from an article about Japan which I wrote for New Worlds in 1970 . . .
I also had my first short book published in Japan: Japan: A Cat's Eye View, a simple English reader with reams of notes by a Japanese professor, that was a lot of fun to write. This was a kind of contemporary version of Natsume Soseki's Meiji-era classic, I Am a Cat, and it sold steadily for years. We had flown our monstrous, long-haired tabby cat out with us to Japan, and brought him back when we returned in 1970; alas he died a year later of an iliac thrombosis.
We departed Japan for Hamburg on a non-stop German cargo boat, a voyage of surreal purgatory which no one ever believes in the telling (but which features in my story "The Flesh of Her Hair"), and for the next ten years we lived in Oxford, where our red-haired daughter was born. Meanwhile I commuted the sixty miles to Birmingham a few days a week to teach futures studies and science fiction to art students, writing novels in wild longhand on the early morning train. I'm not sure whether I was teaching the first full-time sf course in higher education in Britain, but it was surely one of the earliest; and for me it was highly educative as regards social anthropology, psychology, semiotics and such, due to the small band of friendly colleagues I worked with there. (Oxford had taught me nothing of the science of linguistics, only how to translate Middle English texts about nuns' underwear.) Likewise illuminating were my encounters with LSD, which showed me a lot about the structure of my perception.
Directly after returning from Japan, and while Judy was contributing comix strips to the remains of the underground press, such as Oz, I wrote one novel of radical, satiric, deconstructive pornography, The Woman Factory, partly stimulated by the innovating Essex House novels, most of which I had picked up in a toy shop in Tokyo called Kiddieland. (While mothers and kids from the U.S. bases were occupied with the toys upstairs, the Dads headed down to the basement to the pornography racks.) The history of this manuscript, which only ever appeared in French, is wildly chequered. Next, I wrote what was to be my first published novel. The Embedding appeared in 1973 (as did daughter Jessica) and took off in a way which I didn't realize at the time was a little out of the ordinary, placing as runner-up in the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and winning the French Prix Apollo. Its use of "soft sciences" (linguistics, anthropology) was perhaps timely. The next novel, The Jonah Kit, won a couple of awards too, and in 1976 I resigned from the School of History of Art to write full-time, to cries of "You'll starve!"-- though alas my former colleagues were soon having their own problems due to the advent of Thatcherism and the academic night of the long knives.
The fool's paradise of a cheaply rented house in central Oxford fell apart by the end of the Seventies (as it did for Oxford professors too). Rocketing property prices crazed our college landlords with greed, and exploiters moved in, ruining a once valid neighborhood. We ended up by protesting actively and were both arrested for criminal damage. I defended us in court successfully; we were even congratulated, on the quiet, by the Police Prosecuting Officer for the presentation of the case and for having committed criminal damage in this particular circumstance. My legal training amounted roughly to sitting in on the previous case to observe how matters were handled, then acting out the right role. It's a life of fiction . . . And after lecturing to 250 Japanese students through a loud-speaker, and negotiating with revolutionary Zengakuren leaders so that I could teach the first half of a class if they could teach the second half, a British courtroom seemed sedate.
A propos the student revolution in Japan (to protest the renewal of the U.S.-Japan security treaty) who knows but I might have become an espionage author? The British Embassy in Tokyo made a vague attempt to recruit me to find out whether the radicals intended to attack the Embassy compound. My would-be spymaster, an upper class twit of the year, was being expensively coached in Japanese by a private tutor, so I asked why he didn't visit some campuses to find out for himself, only to receive the protest, "Oh that's much too dangerous!"
Oxford had become poison, and the Japanese had just bought rights to several books, so we were able to buy out--into the little Northamptonshire village of Moreton Pinkney. Shortly after, we jointed the Labour Party, and before long I was fighting an election as Labour Party candidate in the area. Here, another possible alternative world branches off, for in this very blue neck of the woods with not many socialists on the ground it is loosely possible that a few years later I might have become a parliamentary candidate, and after losing locally, have moved on a few years later to a winnable seat.
Village life became very involving, with myself as seemingly permanent secretary of the village hall--helping organize fêtes and quizzes and barn suppers--and we also got ourselves deep into gardening, winning the silver challenge cup three years running in the horticultural show for best front flower garden.
Village life! Garden shows! It sounds like a plateau of stability, up out of the floodwater. But I don't believe it. Ever time a jet fighter screams overhead practicing low level attacks in this empty quarter, every time a nuclear-capable F-111 drifts by, I fail to believe it. Once out in the countryside you begin to notice elements of the war machine hiding behind every other herd of cows--with an unbelievable 140- plus American facilities crammed into this little island smaller than most U.S. states, never mind the British facilities. At present we're all under sentence of death, not just personal death but collective species death. This I object to. If a meteorite strike does us in, so be it. But for us to do this to ourselves on our garden planet, which may possibly be the only abode of conscious life in the universe, would be madness, folly, and evil.
Hence we became active too in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, leading to such events as entering the local communications base (where Big Ear awaits the word from Mystic Rose, alias the man in the White House) to hold a strawberry picnic beneath the technological totem poles of the third world war. Such episodes led to my first horror novel, The Power, about evil, nuclear war, bases, and the peace people.
What is my own work? It's many things by now. It's metaphysical sf about the possibilities of higher consciousness. It's adventure. It's fantasy. It's comedy and satire. It's horror. The strands weave and unweave.
Being a freelance writer rather resembles walking a tightrope--without visible end--stretched over a dark abyss. Sometimes you're up on the rope; sometimes you're hanging on by your fingernails. But while you're up, you got to dance on that rope. You got to dance.
What next? I don't know. So I dance along the rope into the darkness, to find out. One day the darkness will grab me, but I hope that along the way I shall have lit up a few things, for myself and for other people in the world.
Moreton Pinkney
23rd September 1988
Copyright 1988 by Ian Watson. All rights reserved.