an Watson, who worked closely with Stanley Kubrick on the story development for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, has been one of Britain's foremost SF writers for 30 years. In his many novels and short stories, he mixes lively erudition, cunning humor and profound linguistic insight; his works are bizarre, outrageous, humane and always immensely entertaining. One of his most impressive books, the collection The Great Escape, has just been published in the United States by Golden Gryphon Press.
Highlights of Watson's earlier output include the novels The Embedding (1973), The Jonah Kit (1975), Alien Embassy (1977), The Gardens of Delight (1980), the Black Current trilogy (1984-5), Whores of Babylon (1988) and The Flies of Memory (1990); Lucky's Harvest (1993) and The Fallen Moon (1994) make up the long planetary epic The Books of Mana. Eight major collections preceded The Great Escape.
Interviewing Ian Watson in April-May 2002, I asked him about his creative background, his collaboration with Kubrick and the cornucopia of wonders that is The Great Escape.
What originally attracted you to science fiction? What do you see as the genre's function, its continuing vocation?
Watson: "N'importe où hors de ce monde" (Anywhere out of this world)—I think Rimbaud said that, around the time he was growing lice in his hair. Or maybe Baudelaire said it. Brought up on Tyneside in the conformist postwar 1950s semiausterity and banality, that was definitely my attitude. Alternatives to these? Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but I didn't live in America. Colin Wilson's The Outsider, etc.—well, certainly, yes, expansion of consciousness, but the rest of the Angry Young Men didn't seem all that exciting, John Osborne's Jimmy Porter emoting about church bells, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim farting around at a provincial university, Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe writing about northern towns that were even grottier than Tyneside ... or science fiction, other worlds, wonders, the stars my destination—and the book of that name was in the local library, along with Van Vogt (obviously a mind-expanded alien with a name like that) and David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, wonderful metaphysical quasi-SF wonderfully dramatized on the BBC Third Programme one Sunday afternoon in, I think, 1956. A Sunday afternoon in 1956 was dire beyond belief.
The function of the SF genre, in my opinion, is to expand the mind in the context of scientific discoveries about the nature of the universe in whole and in parts, and to spur us technologically towards finding out more, including more about the nature of life and ourselves. Such factors as the threat of nuclear warfare, Chernobyl, acid rain, global warning, ozone holes, pollutants in the environment, fear of genetic engineering, etc., have pissed off a lot of people with science and its products (though where would be without those?), hence the predominance in bookshops of fantasy (a lot of which serves a maintenance function, of healing restoration), where the rules are those of magic rather than of scientific reason, and the increasing rejection of reason in religious fundamentalisms, anti-evolutionary so-called Creation Science, and New Age spiritual wishy-washiness, which is nice enough but probably not very helpful with regard to our survival as a species, which has to be through more and better technology.
Since the beginning of your career, your writing has strongly reflected your interest in linguistics. What theoretical linguistic standpoint do you proceed from, and what would you say has been your most successful fictional expression of your thinking in this area?
Watson: Anything important I know about linguistics is self-taught. I did an English degree at Oxford in the 1960s, but we wasted our time (in my view!) studying sound shifts from Old to Middle to Modern English and translating texts about nuns' underwear because such were the only surviving examples of some dialect. Fine enough for proto-Tolkiens, I suppose. Saussure was mentioned in one lecture, but that was about it as regards modern scientific linguistics, semiotics, etc. I boned up on these and related structural anthropology when I was teaching futurology and SF at what was then Birmingham Polytechnic Art & Design Centre in the early '70s. One of my colleagues was a structural anthropologist, and another was into semiotics.
The standpoint I proceeded from was Chomsky's theory of general grammar innately programmed into us, which allows children rapidly to acquire any human language, and my first novel, The Embedding, was the first SF novel to promote this. By contrast a novel like Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao follows the perhaps more colorful but dodgy Sapir/Whorf theory that languages arising in different cultures condition different views of reality (although I made some use of this too)—thus a Hopi Indian supposedly perceives the world differently from a European. Putting it crudely, Sapir/Whorf divides human languages. Chomsky unites all languages at some deep level, so his radical political activism is a logical outcome of his linguistic theories.
I've grown increasingly interested in Wittgenstein's idea that words speak through us, rather than us "choosing" what we say. Language constructs us rather than us constructing language.
I'm very interested in all codes of communication: body language, costume, cosmetics, perfume, whatever. Perhaps the universe essentially consists of information. So I'm rather fond of my novel The Flies of Memory, its principal character a body language expert.
You are one of SF's foremost Ideas Men—to read any work of yours is to be dumbstruck by the range of your concepts and your ingenious interweaving of them. I won't fall into the old cliché of asking where you get your ideas from; rather: once ideas have occurred to you, how do they evolve—and cross-pollinate—into stories and novels?
Watson: Usually when two (or even three) entirely separate ideas come together, this pollinates a story or a novel. Somebody once wrote about me: what other people see as a coincidence, Ian Watson views as a connection. The fusion of two ideas, like sperm and egg, gives rise to an embryo story which then usually grows quite quickly, sprouting limbs and other parts seemingly spontaneously.
None of my stories has ever been pre-planned. My first few novels were planned in advance, but ever since Miracle Visitors I've relied more on intuition than planning. Miracle Visitors was a hard book to write because I had no idea where it was going. I suppose this was the whole point of the book—about a phenomenon which first reveals but then conceals itself in ambiguities. Coincidentally, while I was writing Miracle Visitors, reports of UFO sightings were appearing in the local newspaper, 30 miles away, 25 miles away, 20—better hurry up and finish this book before they get to me!
Since then I've relaxed more, except as regards doing a lot of rewriting after I capture a story. Whether I'm a good writer or not, I'm certainly a busy rewriter. Oops, that's nonsense, I'm not relaxed when I'm writing—I get deeply involved. What I mean is that I don't worry that I won't be able to finish something, no matter how crazy the situation. If a story isn't a bit crazy it isn't interesting enough.
In 1990-1991, you (quite famously) worked with Stanley Kubrick on the story development of A.I., the film he didn't live to complete. You were his Ideas Man, in a very real sense. How did this relationship come about, and how would you sum up the experience?
Watson: Stanley's assistant phoned a number of SF booksellers and asked, "Who is a British SF writer with lots of ideas?" My name came up. Books were ordered. Stanley read a few stories and I was phoned. A motorbike courier delivered the Brian Aldiss vignette which originally gave Stanley the idea for a robot Pinocchio, then I was invited down for Chinese takeout.
Stanley said the project had bogged down and asked me to write a 12,000-word story doing whatever I wished with the material. Highest pay rate I ever had for a story that no one will ever read: $20,000. Summoned once more, I briefly nursed the illusion that I might have come up with something filmable. "It's no use for the project," Stanley said, "but I like the way you did it." And so commenced nine months of us trying out innumerable storylines and variants.
I visited two or three times a week to spend the whole afternoon, I faxed scenes, we talked on the phone for hours. Escher-thinking ruled. Houses of cards collapsed and rose again. "Look, Ian," said Stanley, "the boy and the bear are going to get nowhere unless someone helps them out, a sort of G.I. Joe character." "How about a Gigolo Joe?" I suggested. "Write some scenes, Ian." I did. "I guess we just lost the kiddie market," said Stanley, "but what the hell." I never thought that Gigolo Joe would make it all the way through to screen, but he did.
It was all a bit like quantum indeterminacy, a myriad possibilities—until finally the wave function collapsed into one actual 90-page story. This is what Spielberg based his screenplay on, but when Stanley first read it he got despondent—and then three months later Stanley phoned and said something like, "This is one of the great stories of the world." Then years passed by.
The constant mind-shifts were a bit disconcerting but I did like Stanley a lot, nice dry sense of humor. When he got despondent I'm glad that he didn't just walk away, as from other people, but took the trouble to phone me. I regarded the project as a sort of surrealist comedy in my life, so my brain only turned into scrambled egg on a couple of occasions.
What's your assessment of A.I. as Steven Spielberg filmed it? Does it live up to your expectations?
Watson: I adore Spielberg's A.I. Of course I'm a wee bit prejudiced, since so much of my story got used, and Jude Law is so wonderful as Gigolo Joe. Dr. Know didn't much appeal to me, being so much like a Disney cartoon, but nothing is perfect for everyone. A.I. seems to have polarized opinion considerably, some people deriding it and others loving it and weeping in the cinema and writing passionately about it as something very special, quite different from the usual Hollywood movie, and important—even philosophically so. There's been quite a bit of confusion among critics, especially about the final 20 minutes, which aren't Spielberg being sentimental (his main addition was the cruel, brutal Flesh Fair), but are exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what Stanley wanted. And as for sentimental, well, at the end of his perfect day David is alone without his mother for ever and ever in a universe which contains no other life, only the evolved Mecha (robots, not visiting aliens!) who can only study the traces and leftovers of extinct human life. David miraculously sheds a tear, and I don't exactly blame him.
The evolved robots are marvelous—"machines of loving grace," to quote a line from a poem by Richard Brautigan. The ending is quite multilayered. A.I. is a movie that is going to need, and receive, a fair amount of reassessment, and this will probably happen sooner rather than later. I think Stanley would have been pretty pleased with what Spielberg did. I am.
After a couple of decades of very steady production of stand-alone novels of quite modest length (and one trilogy of such), you embarked in the early '90s on a huge 1,100-page planetary-romance novel: the twin Books of Mana. Why that change of pace? How readily did a national epic poem—the Finnish Kalevala—translate/transform into SF?
Watson: American editors had been asking Gollancz, "When is Ian going to write a big book?" So I did. So the same editors then said, "It's too big." They probably felt that The Books of Mana (which, as you say, are—or is—actually one long novel) were a bit eccentric to cater to the big-saga-buying readership.
I myself had also been wanting for quite a while to write a big book, to spread out a feast as it were. I don't write very fast (despite appearances, perhaps!), so I knew this would take a long time, a couple of years, as it turned out. With the money Stanley had paid me, not to mention Games Workshop's 40,000 quid for my four Warhammer 40,000 novels (which I had great lurid Gothic fun writing), and with a reasonably generous advance from Gollancz, I could afford to take two years doing just what I wanted without worrying. I spent those two years on a sort of poetic high.
This would have been no use if I hadn't encountered my ideal subject, thanks to a trip to Finland. I read (in translation, I hasten to add, but a wonderful translation) a book of poems by Eino Leino which are capsules of themes and episodes from the Kalevala, and as I read these already they were mutating into scenes and events on another world. The important thing for me about the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of language to control and transform reality—so here we come back to my perennial obsession, and maybe it is The Books of Mana rather than The Flies of Memory that I should single out as best expressing my preoccupations with language.
Sometime after the Books of Mana, your novel writing seemed to experience a hiatus; you lost your British publisher, Gollancz. What was the background to this setback?
Watson: I was told by a reliable source that a sales director at Gollancz hadn't been doing very much to direct sales but had used sales trips to set himself up in business in America with an American woman. I was told by another reliable source that the sales department seemed to be actively engaged in trying to destroy the careers of several authors. Gollancz even forgot to export any copies of one of my novels to Australia, as I discovered after a senior university librarian, who collects my books, contacted me.
Heigh-ho, not enough sales, even though my Hard Questions had earned out its advance (admittedly partly thanks to translation sales). Off I went to try Orion. Orion suddenly bought Gollancz. A six-month moratorium on deciding anything followed. Off I went to Virgin. The managing editor wanted my latest novel, Mockymen, as lead title for their new SF line. Just as we were about to sign a contract, the sales team told him he already had three books to launch with, can't have another one. So the new line launched with three titles by unknown authors and bombed. Off, next, to the excellent David Marshall's Pumpkin Books. Yes, yes! Just as the book was about to be printed, accumulating surrealistic personal and business misfortunes overtook Mr. Pumpkin at the eleventh hour. By now lots and lots of time had been wasted. However, Golden Gryphon Press will now publish Mockymen in autumn 2003. The cover, by Steve Montiglio, looks gorgeous.
The other cause of hiatus was that my wife, Judy, was disabled by steadily worsening emphysema. I was her full-time carer. Wheelchair clocked in, oxygen cylinders clocked in, etc., etc., a downward spiral. Life became very ritualized and constrained. Caring occupied more and more time and energy as the condition worsened, until she died at Easter last year. So when I had time I wrote some stories and also poems (culminating in my first volume of verse from DNA Publications recently, The Lexicographer's Love Song). I spent quite a bit of time traveling last year for a change: Spain, Ireland, Germany, Poland.
Your new collection from Golden Gryphon Press, The Great Escape, is most impressive; and it's your ninth such compilation! Your output of short fiction has been prolific, but (on the strength of this and previous volumes) very consistent as well. What's the special attraction of the short-story form for you?
Watson: I love short stories. Years ago, in the introduction to my Slow Birds collection, I wrote that novels are monsters that escape from the author to make their own independent way in the world, but short stories stay at home in the personal mental greenhouse, like bonsai, cacti, whatever. Often there's as much pleasure in seeing a story in print as in receiving copies of a full-length novel which may have taken a year to write. A story has at least a chance of achieving a sort of perfection. Someone once remarked that a novel is never finished, it is merely abandoned.
The Great Escape is an eclectic book, mixing a wide range of speculative genres, from SF to fantasy to horror. Is there a theme linking these diverse offerings? The concept of memes is repeatedly discussed ...
Watson: I think most of my story collections have been fairly eclectic because I like to write stories that range as widely as possible in theme and mood. I try not to repeat myself. A linking theme? Searching, that's it. Almost all of the stories consist of searches, for this or for that. I suppose very many stories do deal with searches, and I write a story in order to search for, well, I suppose, meaning, significance. To see the familiar in a new way, and to affect the reader's vision of the world likewise.
Certain stories—"The Shape of Murder," "The Great Escape," "My Vampire Cake," "Ahead!"—are exuberant, over-the-top entertainments, the play of a razor-sharp, paradoxical sense of humor. Isn't it a dangerous kind of wit that launches hell on a wholesale voyage to heaven in "The Great Escape," or (in "Such Dedication") incarnates Christ's (alleged) brother as an astronaut?
Watson: Wit is a dangerous faculty. I remember, in Brighton at a World SF Convention, an American writer asked me earnestly, "Why are there so many Greek restaurants in Brighton?" I promptly answered, "Because Greece is closer to Brighton than to other parts of Britain." Later he wrote complaining that he had asked a serious question but I had merely been witty at him. Oh dear, here we call it a joke. My sense of humor sometimes gets me into trouble. I don't think there should be any taboo topics. This leads to censorship and fatwas and whatnot. "Sacred" things should be probed, not protected. There's still good taste to maintain!—but a whole lot of people live by delusionary belief systems. People happily propagandize these systems, the anti-Darwinian creationists, for instance. Why defer to delusions?
"Caucus Winter" and "The Amber Room" have much of the aspect of thrillers, post-Cold War ventures into Eastern Europe. You've spent some time in Finland and Poland. What about Kaliningrad, the setting for "The Amber Room"? Why do such places lend themselves so naturally to portrayals of perilous intrigue?
Watson: I've been to Finland twice, but I haven't actually been to Kaliningrad (yet), except in my mind. These places are out in the margins, or have been so—Finland controlled or semi-controlled by Russia, Kaliningrad an enclave separated from Mother Russia. At the margins shadowy figures mingle. Thus intrigue.
Some of the quieter stories in The Great Escape, such as "The China Cottage," "The Last Beast out of the Box" and "Tulips From Amsterdam," read almost like psychological allegories. How fundamental to your literary technique is this sort of surrealism?
Watson: In June 1999, The New York Review of Science Fiction printed an essay by me which amongst other things puts forward the perhaps tongue-in-cheek proposition that SF is closely akin to surrealism—what else are the alien worlds of SF but a kind of fulfilment of the surrealist quest for imaginary nonhuman worlds? Indeed, in France, where the surrealist Boris Vian beautifully translated Van Vogt to great acclaim, Van Vogt's works were viewed as great literature of the surrealist school.
Psychological allegories? "The China Cottage" is almost a true story. My mother owned that china cottage made in Japan. After my mother died, Judy and I sought more and more examples. There must be 150 pieces in this house. I can spot a piece of Maruhon Ware in a junk shop window from the opposite side of a street, but nowadays I rein myself in. The story merely takes this to greater extremes of life-consuming obsession. As for "The Last Beast Out of the Box," my own daughter Jess painted the selfsame box with different cats when she was a child ... and a new cat clocked in as depicted. A number of stories are related to my life, as I experience it. I tend to experience things exaggeratedly, not always a sensible idea but it does produce stories.
Probably the most surprising piece in The Great Escape is "Ferryman," a wisecracking interplanetary space opera that reminded me of the early work of Robert Heinlein. Ian Watson writing like Heinlein?! How did this come about?
Watson: Another story of obsession—in this case, an obsession on the part of aliens. Maybe obsession spurs a lot of my stories, as well as searching. Although a search is a kind of obsession. (I am finding it quite therapeutic doing this interview. Much cheaper than visiting a psychiatrist.) I can't remember where the bombardment-by-coffins idea came from. I think I jotted it down years ago and put it in a file. I shouldn't be surprised if I was reading New Scientist and found something about the dangers to Earth from incoming asteroids and another something about people arranging for their ashes to be fired into space. I was never much of a fan of Heinlein and I haven't read a word by him, ancient or modern, since the solipsistic bloat of I Will Fear No Evil in the 1970s. Hmm, while I was busy writing "Ferryman" I was well aware that a different sort of story from my "usual" was emerging. Ye gods, can I parody somebody I have hardly read? This leads to very Borgesian thoughts.
"What Actually Happened in Docklands" is a fascinating sort of critical fantasy, in which you portray in lightly fictionalized form a certain famous SF critic (who shares his initials with Julius Caesar, and writes a column for SF Weekly) and a certain fantasist obsessed with trees (his name is not unlike Robin Hood's). Are these people truly this heroic, and are fantasy conventions ever quite as exciting as the one you describe?
Watson: The famous SF critic, whom I know and love (honest!), never reads stories on first publication but always waits until they have been winnowed into a book, so now that "Docklands" is appearing in a book will the sh*t hit the fan? No, of course not. A lot of the story is true, or by now it seems to me to be true—apart from the Allotes actually appearing in the hotel. I did dream exactly that dream of them and the Forest Folk on the first night of the convention, the same night that my daughter Jess dreamt her SF dream as described. The rooftop makeover is actual; I saw it on TV. Am I trying to make out that I have no imagination? That I just go round experiencing things exaggeratedly? Anyway, "Robin Hood" has always looked quite heroic, and he writes of heroes (myth-egos, now is that the word?), while Julius Caesar has to be a hero of criticism, what with an encyclopedia containing a whole hidden series of trapdoors and mazes revealing a Theory of Fantasy which he then ingeniously proceeds to apply to the writing of a science-fiction novel! Orange Pip, Plum Stone, Pear Core, now what was it called? [Appleseed, perhaps?-NG] I believe I had my dream because of a conversation with him in the subterranean corkscrew car park beneath the convention venue, so the story is all his own fault. As for excitement, well, Bob Silverberg and his wife were robbed. Police and cream cakes!
Looking at your recent as yet uncollected short fiction: your Asimov's novella "A Speaker for the Wooden Sea" is all about absinthe, that forbidden narcotic drink. Can you describe your personal experience with the stuff? Something about slippers catching fire…
Watson: I wrote "Speaker" before I had tasted any absinthe, but researching the story wised me up to what constitutes proper absinthe, namely the percentage of thujone, the active pharmacological substance in wormwood, Artemisia absinthia. So when I went to Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) last August for a Poetenfest and happened to find an upmarket booze shop hosting an absinthe promotion, after a chat with the enthusiastic owner I bought a high-strength bottle for a ridiculous price, along with slotted spoons for the sugar cubes.
Incidentally, there were no poets at the Poetenfest—apparently "poet" has a much wider connotation in German of creative artist. I'd thought what I would do in Aachen was check up on Charlemagne, whose bones are there—every five years they get shown to the public, though I was a year late. Pam Sargent had asked me to write a story for her upcoming anthology Conqueror Fantastic, alternative history takes on Genghis Khan or Napoleon or whoever you please. Which hero for me? I cudgeled my brains. The invitation to Aachen seemed like an omen, but in the event Aachen for me was absinthe and 102 full-size painted horses in the streets or sitting on benches reading newspapers, not forgetting two golden unicorns mounting the front of a pub vertically. I did not see those because of the absinthe but because Aachen was hosting an equestrian festival at the same time.
I must warn about the drawbacks of absinthe. One is the time-consuming ceremony of preparing the stuff—drizzling water slowly over a sugar cube, then dripping absinthe onto a teaspoonful of granulated sugar and setting fire to it till it caramelizes before dunking in the absinthe and topping up with chilled water. No wonder those absinthe drinkers in French paintings of the 1890s look so melancholy. "Waiter, another glass please." "Oui, Monsieur, in half an hour. ..."
And there is great danger of setting yourself on fire. When I carried out the ceremony at home, too much absinthe spilled on to the sugar. As soon as I lit the spoon, flame leapt to a piece of absinthe-stained paper lying on the kitchen table. I hurled the paper on to the floor, which thanks goodness is of slate, and stamped on it. My slipper promptly burst into flames, compelling me to kick it off then beat it against the floor. Beware!
On the other hand you can try Johnny Depp's method in that gorgeous if ghastly Jack the Ripper movie, From Hell. Lie in the bath (a sensible fire precaution), pour a glass full of undiluted absinthe, then drizzle laudanum over the sugar cube.
Oh yes, the conqueror I sought ... I wrote a story about gay Nazi sailors, seven-kilometer-long battleships, Hitler and Wittgenstein.
What's next for Ian Watson? New novels and short stories, a further collection?
Watson: The next novel I write might be in collaboration with an American writer (just as I wrote a novel in collaboration with Michael Bishop years ago) but since this isn't settled yet I shan't say more. Of course, as I said earlier, my much-delayed Mockymen is due out next year. It starts with a novella, "Secrets," which appeared in Interzone, then moves into a hardship near-future when enigmatic aliens-bearing-gifts use the bodies of victims of a drug called Bliss to host their alien minds. I suppose by now enough uncollected stories have already mounted up to fill another collection, but heavens, the latest one is only just being published right now.
Thank goodness Games Workshop are going to reissue with a fanfare my three Inquisitor books starting this Summer—ever since I went on e-mail I've had a steady stream of pleas from "Desperately Seeking" in the UK, USA, OZ, Germany.
Oh, and my erotic satire, The Woman Plant, came out in Japanese last year in a beautifully produced sexy hardback and has sold 5,000 hardback copies to date—it's a finalist for the Seiun Award, the "Japanese Hugo." I'm hoping to get involved in more film work. I just joined an agency in Hollywood which actively (as opposed to passively) promotes suitable SF stories and novels to producers and directors.
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