n this excellent collection of stories from British writer Ian Watson, published mostly in the 1990s, reality and human perception tumble over one another like electricity and magnetism in light—both are needed to shed illumination on reality. The stories in the collection are divided between tales of the far future, yarns involving present-day, post-cyberpunk hackers and metaphysical reflections on the nature of reality and that odd ability of matter to sometimes communicate with itself—whether in the form of human beings or by means of a stranger sort of sentience.
The main character of the title story, "The Great Escape," is the Impresario Angel, who is in charge of holding a giant magnifying lens through which "the blessed souls in Paradise are able to view the torments of the damned." He notices that there's a moment during the change of angelic shifts when no one is watching hell. In that instant, do the damned and demons cavort? By merely altering his perspective enough to ask the question, the Impresario Angel sets about a realigning transformation of the geography of both hell and paradise.
The choice of narrator or viewpoint character is central to all of these stories. "Nanunculus," for instance, is narrated by a nanotech robot algorithm within the head of a math genius who is plumbing his own psychology trying to get rid of a mental block. The payoff will be his imminent solution to the problem of time travel. After that, goodbye nanunculus! Not surprisingly, the nanunculus within develops other plans for his fate.
"When Thought-Mail Failed" is a beautifully worded version of what has become a subgenre of science fiction: The Group Mind Comes Unglued. Employing a beguiling faux-naif voice, Watson takes his characters through a concise rediscovery of not only language but power politics, in the course of a two-day solar-flare EMP pulse.
An intelligence that's far from artificial
Though Watson is probably best known at the moment for developing the scenario with Stanley Kubrick for what became the movie A.I. (he came up with the winning gigolo robot character played by Jude Law), he has been writing groundbreaking stories since the 1970s. In his science fiction, he
usually deals with the scientific and technological changes with a few broad strokes, then concentrates on the communication and language of the future. With new technology and changing culture comes strange, fundamentally different ways of feeling and thinking.
The stories in this collection are Escher-like portraits of the way reality transforms the consciousness of a character or society. But the changed mind causes feedback. An alteration in conscious perception can actively alter the universe itself. The stories are at their best when Watson gets inside the head of the ant who is walking the Moebius strip, then takes a quick step back and reveals the topological weirdness of what seemed to be straightforward reality.
At times, having accomplished this task, Watson will end a story abruptly, and the reader is left asking: Shouldn't this be where the story starts, rather than its conclusion? There certainly is enough wonder-inducing material in most of these tales to supply a few novels. More often, though, the open nature of the endings provides food for thought about reality today. Watson supplies intriguing hints that skewed perceptions of the present and the memories of what has gone before are as open-ended and constantly changing as any science-fiction future.
