Not long ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Ian Watson give a reading, which can be a problematic event for many writers. Eloquence on paper does not always translate into fluency in speech; a fair number of writers (Vladimir Nabokov was one notable example) easily become tongue-tied in public and can barely utter a complete and comprehensible sentence. Others (I am one) live in terror that the speech defects they managed to overcome may suddenly crop up right in the middle of a reading or lecture. It may be that such difficulties in communicating are what drove some of us to become writers, since spoken language was more often an obstacle than a bridge.
Ian Watson has happily escaped this curse. If spoken language is a bridge, then he is a Fred Astaire dancing across its span. The stories he chose to read at this particular reading, from his collection Stalin's Teardrops (1991), were "The Case of the Glass Slipper," in which Cinderella's prince seeks the aid of Sherlock Holmes, and "The Human Chicken," the tale of a couple who, expecting their first child, become the parents of a chicken. To a friend of mine, an Anglophile, Ian Watson came across as a melding of Michael Rennie and John Mills, with perhaps a touch of Ronald Colman and David Niven-the image some Americans hold of the ideal Englishman. To put it another way, so as to avoid stereotypes, the man's sharp, penetrating intelligence shines out of every word he says. On this occasion, the stories Ian read were playful and humorous examples of his art, but nearly every implication and detail one might derive from the central situation was carefully worked out, then twisted into a delightful reductio ad absurdum.
The audience was enthralled by both the stories and the author's delivery, but I wasn't really too surprised by his ability to charm them. In the early '80s, after we had been corresponding for some time, Ian proposed that we edit an anthology together (this anthology, Afterlives, was eventually published in 1986). I sometimes think I agreed to do the book largely because it meant there would be even more letters from him, and entertaining letters they were, filled with tales of life in a northern English town, gardening competitions, the care and feeding of cats and rabbits, demonstrations by the members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and what it is like to run (or to stand, as the British put it) for political office, among other adventures. Ian has a rare talent, namely the ability to take pains with even the simplest pursuits, and to be playful or sprightly about even the most profound ideas and issues. This quality is reflected in his work. He is never superficial or facile, yet, unlike some writers who concern themselves with important political or intellectual issues in their work, he is never ponderous or labored. As serious, or even terrifying, as a particular Watson novel or story might be, the reader has the sense of an alert intelligence taking delight in various intellectual constructs.
In a short essay, "Dancing on a Tightrope," Ian Watson talks about the beginnings of his interest in science fiction:
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...
...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 a prize-winner in France. Thus the strands of life unwind strangely.(1)
The Embedding, published in 1973, was soon followed by The Jonah Kit (1975), and The Martian Inca (1977), two novels similar in structure to the author's first in that seemingly unrelated events (an experiment in linguistics and an anthropologist's work with an Amazonian tribe in The Embedding, the transformation of a Bolivian Indian's consciousness and a Mars expedition in The Martian Inca, metaphysical speculation and a project involving whales in The Jonah Kit) are revealed as essential parts of the puzzles Watson presents. In Alien Embassy (1977), Miracle Visitors (1978), and God's World (1979), he is more overtly concerned with the nature of reality, an important theme in much of his fiction. About this particular aspect of Watson's work, Michael Bishop wrote:
One idea exploited in different guises or subtle variations from novel to novel is Watson's strategically held "belief" that consensus reality, or the world of everyday experience, is ripe for transcendence. The means of transcending our human limitations or the prison of the physical universe may differ from one fictional foray to the next, but the fact that there does exist a transcendent mental set or cosmic continuum to which we may or should aspire remains a conspicuous constant. Although Watson usually embeds this idea in a scrupulously rational context (often it is a research project or a scientific mission), a strong element of the primordial or the mystical (from meta-linguistics to Sufism) lends his several restatements of the concept a rich and endlessly ramifying ambiguity.(2)
In recent years, Watson has written three novels, collectively known as the Black Current Trilogy (The Book of the River, 1984; The Book of the Stars, 1984; and The Book of Being, 1985), which may be characterized as science fantasy. Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986) is a novel of fantasy set in a chess-world, but the author soon thrusts the central characters into game-worlds with different rules; The Power (1987), The Fire Worm (1988), and Meat (1988) are horror novels set in the present. Other book-length works, along with Watson's substantial number of short stories (he has published well over one hundred pieces of short fiction) display both his versatility and his economy. In a genre where many writers are tempted to repeat themselves, or to put enough padding in their stories to make them excessively long novels or series (one editor has called this "putting the story on the stretcher," but a better metaphor might be stuffing a turkey to the point where there's more dressing than meat), Watson is both concise in his prose and profligate with original notions. "Ian Watson is a writer who never does the same thing twice," Orson Scott Card wrote in a review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Furthermore, he doesn't often do the same thing anybody else has done."
Perhaps one of the sources of this inventiveness is the view Watson himself holds of what science fiction should be:
SF is founded upon the exploration of ideas, rather than stylistics. It is a community of ideas; in its sum, it composes what one might call an "idea-myth," the idea-myth of man in the universe, of future-humanity (alien to ourselves at present), of the alien future, of life other than we yet know it...SF is already a mythology, in total; though unlike the hieratic mythologies of antiquity, it is a multiplistic mythology, with as many worlds, futures, heroes, Gods as there are writers (the sources for these), though with certain shared structural motifs: the sense of future time, the sense of future humanity, the sense of radical change, the sense of the alien. SF is a mythology of change-which we sorely need today...(3)
The Embedding was an auspicious debut; the novel was honored with second place in the 1974 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and won the 1975 Prix Apollo, given in France for the best science fiction novel of the year in translation. In The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas commented that "Watson writes with contagious enthusiasm about intellectual passions; his extraterrestrials and his Amazon Indians are equally convincing 'aliens': and even his somewhat doctrinaire radical politics offer a refreshing contrast to the non-ideological (perhaps I should say, anti-ideological) bias of most American science fiction." J.G. Ballard, writing in the British newspaper The New Statesman, called The Embedding "the most remarkable first novel I have read for ten years... He writes a heady, zest-filled prose that whips up a froth of speculation about anthropology and linguistics, topology, structuralism, and astro-physics-in fact, after reading Watson's novels one has the first dazed impression that there is virtually nothing that they aren't about."
The Embedding begins with Chris Sole, a linguist who is working on a project to teach artificial languages to children in order to see what their more flexible minds may regard as "real." His friend Pierre is living among the Xemahoa, a people in the Amazon who have two languages, one their daily tongue and the other a complex, difficult, "embedded" language incomprehensible to them except during drug-induced trances. Another writer might have been content with following only the linguistic experiment, or the efforts of Pierre to convince the Xemahoa that they are threatened by the efforts of Brazil and the United States to turn much of the Amazon basin into a vast lake. But Watson introduces a third element, aliens who arrive on Earth hoping to trade some of their advanced knowledge for insights into Earth's linguistic structures. The novel becomes increasingly suspenseful as the reader follows the tale to its startling conclusion.
This novel is notable for being one of the first science-fictional explorations of modern linguistic theories. Previous science fiction had dealt with the possible problems human beings might have in communicating with aliens. In "A Martian Odyssey" (1934), Stanley G. Weinbaum shows a man trying to understand a Martian life form; in H. Beam Piper's story "Omnilingual" (1957), an expedition to Mars is trying to translate a written language that is all that remains of this planet's former inhabitants. One influential assumption among many science fiction writers was that different languages can result in extremely different views of reality, and that the languages we speak shape our thoughts. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), in which the language Newspeak is designed to make disloyal or skeptical thinking virtually impossible, is the most famous development of this linguistic premise. Other notable science fiction works based on the role of language include Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (1957), which shows two cultures made radically different by their language structures, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966), in which an artificial language is an alien civilization's weapon against humankind, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984), where alien languages are mastered by human children bred for the purpose.
Watson, in The Embedding, begins with the assumption, formulated by Noam Chomsky, that all human beings have an innate capacity for acquiring any human language, and that all our languages are, on a deep level, structurally related. He goes on to speculate that a similar relationship may exist between our languages and alien languages (given that we inhabit the same universe), and that language itself may shape reality. In his essay "Towards an Alien Linguistics," Watson concluded:
...we must be prepared to entertain the idea of a self- creating, self-examining cosmos, in which life is somehow involved in the very processes which bring it into being in the first place; and that the nature of life's involvement is, in the broadest sense, a linguistic one: its double role of message, and observer or messenger. Since language evolves, we must also entertain the idea that structural evolution of language is to some extent determined by the demands of this participatory role; and furthermore that language may tend evolutionarily to yield up more of its nature, so that it will one day be possible to represent in language that which is mirrored in language. Or, that this is already possible, elsewhere-in languages which we would therefore have great difficulty comprehending... ...just as we are here making our world and our society, so in another sense we are engaged in the making of the universe through that which is at the root of our social being: our language.(4)
Often, when Ian picks up his telephone, and the caller engages in the linguistic commonplace of asking how he is, he will answer with the phrase (enunciated in sonorous Oxfordian tones with only a hint of a northern English accent), "I am continuing." Not "I'm fine," "Finished that book," or "Things could be worse," but "I am continuing." Somehow, this seems an appropriate response from a writer who continues to develop and explore new literary and intellectual territory while others retrace old notions. He is, and will likely continue to be, a writer whose novels probe the nature of reality itself.
Johnson City, New York
January 27, 1992
(1) "Dancing on a Tightrope," in The Work of Ian Watson: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide, by Douglas A. Mackey. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1989, p. 129.
(2) Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers, edited by Curtis C. Smith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981, p. 571.
(3) Ian Watson, "The Crudities of Science Fiction," in The Book of Ian Watson. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Ziesing, pp.93-94.
(4) The Book of Ian Watson. Willimantic, CT: Mark V. Ziesing, 1985, pp. 60- 61.
"Introduction to The Embedding" by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 1992 by The
Easton Press (MBI, Inc.), Norwalk, Connecticut. All rights reserved. Appears
here by permission of The Easton Press.