Most Popular Books by Ian WATSON

Ian Watson''s latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished stone carvings without apparently having the tools to do so (''The Moon and Michelangelo''); people fighting their way through the various levels of what appears to be a real-life version of a computer adventure game (''Jewels in an Angel''s Wing''); and a zoo in which are caged the extensions into our universe of four-dimensional hyberbeings (''Hyperzoo''). And that is only the beginning: there are fifteen stories in all, each one a state-of-the-art example of short science fiction at its finest.

Ian Watson''s brilliant debut novel was one of the most significant publications in British SF in the 1970s. Intellectually bracing and grippingly written, it is the story of three experiments in linguistics, and is driven by a searching analysis of the nature of communication. Deep in the Brazilian jungle, an isolated tribe face eviction from their ancestral lands - and the psychedelic fungus that makes their religious language possible. In a British laboratory, a brilliant linguist conducts cutting-edge experiments - but does his search for answers come at too high a cost? And in the ultimate test of linguistics, First Contact presents a challenge unlike any humanity has faced before . . . Fiercely intelligent, energetic and challenging, The Embedding immediately established Watson as a writer of rare power and vision, and is now recognized as a modern classic of SF.

British Science Fiction award winner Ian Watson graces us here with a brilliant new collection of short stories and essays. Though he dazzles the reader with his footwork in the kaleidoscope intensity of his vision, each piece is plainly the work of a master craftsman. Whether he is dealing with a future culture where whales control us ("The Culling") or taking a hilarious poke at the matter of government funding ("The President''s Not for Turning"), his concepts are clear and undeniably logical. True to the highest ideal of science fiction, Watson carries present tendencies of our society to possible conclusions in "Roof Gardens under Saturn," and points a warning finger at the consequences of alienation from the environment. In an innovative style which borders on the experimental, Watson explores in "The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle" the horrors of fascism. Ian Watson''s writing stays with us. He entertains and he makes us think. If in some future and better world politicians were to take advice form writers, Watson should be one of them.

The Very Slow Time Machine arrives on earth in 1985. Its sole inhabitant is old and mad. Soon it becomes apparent that for him, time is going slowly backward. With every day, he is getting younger and saner. The world, and its whole concept of time, science and philosophy, must wait for him to speak. But while the world waits, it changes...

Meet Qua, the quantum computer with the immense power capabilities that tunes into pathways in parallel universes to operate at lightning speed. But with such power comes the threat of catastrophe, and as government agents, cult disciples, and computer criminals learn what this computer is capable of, Cambridge researcher Clare Conway makes every attempt to safeguard herself and society from the realities she discovers about Qua. For all of the power this computer offers, it threatens to spark a civil war in America, a danger unlike any other that history has ever known.

A collection of science-fiction short stories by the author of "Lucky''s Harvest". They feature dozens of characters, a new way of travelling between the stars, a strange planet, magical powers, bravura set-pieces, and manoeuvres of narrative.

In his fourth short-story collection, Watson again demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his imagination. The title story has ancient witchcraft meeting complacent modern suburbia in a tale of spine-chilling horror, while ''When the Timegate Failed'' casts an unexpected light in the dangers of space travel and man''s powers of self-delusion. Alien matters of a different kind crop up in ''Windows'', in which mysterious artefacts found on Mars prove to be something of a problem for their chic human owners. Evil Water is a highly inventive collection which is a delight to read.

The Inquisition is at war with itself. Shadowy figures conspire within its ranks to enslave the human race. Their aim: to crate a psychic doomsday weapon which can destroy the fabric of reality. Rogue Inquisitor Jaq Draco, aided by his warrior band, faces both his former allies and deadly aliens in his struggle to save mankind. Original.

The sudden appearance of angelic beings bearing a mystical space drive and a summons to ''''God''s World'''' launches an international crew of scientists on a voyage to the far limits of space. There they become embroiled in an alien war that will decide the fate of all creation . . .

When Tom Ryan stops his car late at night on a dark road for a man dressed as a Roman centurion, his first thought is that he''s picked up one of those amateur re-enactors but the man, Marcus Appius Silvanus appears to speak only Latin. He insists the year is AD60 and that the British Queen is Boudicca - and that he and his men of the Fourteenth Gemina are in hot pursuit of her. Tom and his sister Mary shelter the Roman, but inadvertently attract the attention of an unscrupulous journalist. He''s not the only one interested in the Ryans: an IRA terrorist who was once Mary''s lover in Northern Ireland tracks her down to tell her the plane crash which killed her parents twenty years ago was caused by the British security services. Deep in the English countryside, those same servants of the state are busy exploiting the theories of a young prodigy to build ''Oracle'', a probe that can view the past - and, they hope, the future, so that threats to national security can be stifled before they occur.

The megalomaniac Godmind is still planning to use all the minds in creation to make a vast ''lens'', and if necessary it will burn out all life in the process. Back beside the river and literally born again, Yaleen represents to the guild of riverwomen the perfect proof of salvation, of life after death. In fact, she is desperately searching for a way to save the whole universe from imminent destruction.

Predictably unpredictable, normally abnormal. Watson combines science fiction and fantasy into an eclectic mix that includes stories about fallen angels in Hell rebelling and mounting a breakout, about the inconvenience of keeping aging parents in your brain instead of a nursing home, about Jesus'' immortal brother as solo passenger on the first starship, about alien coffins bombarding the solar system, about right-wing U.S. militias stealing a quantum computer to commit nuclear blackmail, about a computer games designer haunted by the cyber-ghost of his murdered wife, about frozen heads and strange mind-changes, and how a cake decorator defeats a vampire with a sweet tooth. De-evolution, treasure-hunting via hang glider, dark animal fantasies, humanity as hive-entity, Hercules Poirot on a starship - Watson takes the strange, the eerie the weird, mixes his seasoned writing skills, and produces a potpourri of the fantastic. These nineteen stories are sure to amuse, bemuse and entertain.

Tattooed on a woman-sized tumour, these tales, told to it as bedtime stories, are by turns surreal, satiric, erotic, obscene, ingenious, hilarious, and quite, quite brilliant. Together, they combine to create a weird and wonderful love story, unlike anything told before.

The river cuts right across the known world, from the impassable Far Precipices to the sea. The people on one bank are cut off from those on the other, for the black current has the power to stop them crossing. Only women can travel repeatedly up and down the river, but when Yaleen joins the boating guild and becomes a riverwoman, she is singled out to follow an even more extraordinary path...

Trapped by the evil Edrick in a locked room, Yaleen is cold-bloodedly murdered. But it is not the end of Yaleen''s story, for she is given a second life - a reincarnation on Earth as a ''cherub''. Soon she encounters Godmind, the megalomaniac artificial deity which controls life on Earth - and maintains a brutal labour colony on the Moon for any who dare to rebel. Bit by bit, Yaleen comes to understand the horrifying project of the Godmind...

''The Inquisition War'' is the classic story of Inquisitor Jaq Draco and his desperate mission to uncover a plot that will bring mankind to its knees before the Dark Powers. This seminal trilogy of Draco, Harlequin, Chaos Child and two linking short stories make the legend of the Inquisition War complete.

In The Gardens of Delight Ian Watson boldly lands a starship within the hallucinatory terrain of Hieronymus Bosch''s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a medieval masterpiece which enchants and horrifies all who see it, for the picture shows what looks to be a paradise of pleasure yet it also displays a terrible hell of torments. And so the ship''s psychologist, Sean Athlone, and two women companions explore the luxurious landscape of giant fruits and birds and strange towers and naked celebrating people, in quest of the godlike alien intelligence that has transformed a planet according to Bosch''s vision, populating it with the colonists from a previous starship.

When a young Russian boy disappears from a top-secret Soviet research establishment and turns up in Tokyo, he presents a major problem for the American security officials. For the boy appears to be part of a sophisticated experiment and to have the mind of a supposedly dead astronaut imperfectly imprinted on his own. If the boy is to be believed, then the experiment has been extended to a whale. In Mexico, ground-breaking research by Nobel Prize winner Paul Hammond has shown that what we perceive as the Universe is no more than the ghost of the real thing. Signals received by his radio telescope have shown him that the Universe God created no longer exists. Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1977

The regions that have survived the holocaust in Watson''s new novel have largely transformed themselves from prewar violence into a peaceful utopia, without either conflict or art. In place of belief in a religious afterlife, the old and ailing accept euthanasia at Houses of Death where priestlike guides counsel them. One of these guides is Jim Todhunter, who pursues research into the nature of death despite official censure. When he is assigned to guide that rarity in the new world - a murderer - he finds a natural ally in the obsessive Nathan Weinberger, himself an ex-guide. As usual with Watson, the initial impression of a green and pleasant land is revealed to be only one facet of a more complex and disturbing reality.

An ancient Power awakes. A modern evil mushrooms into apocalypse. Cocooned in a nightmare world, the village of Melfort waits, as The Power feeds on the death and destruction, fuelling its gross appetite. And the dead rise up.

He is a financial giant but the Sponsor wants more - he wants to become a super human, to be the modern-day Adam, father to a new generation of humans with heightened DNA. He had the viral injection to change himself, the will to do it, and now all he needs is an Eve to join him on his journey. He thinks he''s found the perfect match in Jean Sandra Norwich, a woman convinced she is trapped between the genes of her mother and daughter. The Sponsor offers her freedom - and so much more, the chance to be the mother of all Superbeings. But she will get more than she bargained for. CONVERTS is a masterpiece of science fiction and Ian Watson has superbly reworked Ovid''s METAMORPHOSES to create an extraordinary futuristic tale.

A multinational expedition has landed on the planet Onogoro, a cold and dour world circling one star of a binary pair. Their objective is to investigate a strange alien race, known to the human visitors as the Kybers. These aliens, dwelling in a great network of ruined palaces, are partly biological creatures and partly machines, with the ability to switch themselves off at will. Expedition scientists discover that the Kyber''s sun is soon to blaze up in a nova, yet the Kybers are not alarmed.

The Mars Probe has crashed. A triumph of Soviet technology, the first two-way interplanetary probe performed brilliantly until the final stage of its return. Then something went wrong: rather than following its programmed course to a soft landing in its country of origin, the probe crashed in the Peruvian Andes. Now a weird infection beyond the understanding of medical science has wiped out an entire village - except for one man, who, alone and undiscovered by medics, survives. He has awakened to find himself become his own ancestor, and a god. Suddenly the flames of an Indian revolution are spreading South America; he is the Martian Inca.

Psychiatrist John Cunningham is secretly also "Jack Cannon", author of popular horror novels. Under hypnotic regression, John''s patient Tony reveals a bizarre and horrifying tale of a "past life" lived on Tyneside in the 1950s, involving two schoolboys and a weird creature with paranormal powers lurking in caves beneath Tynemouth Castle. As John regresses Tony through earlier lives as far back as the 14th century it begins to seem that the local legend, captured in folksong, of a malevolent Lambton Worm may have had a basis in fact: that it was, in fact, the salamander of alchemical belief, summoned by an alchemist known as Raymond Lully, and possibly still locked below Tynemouth Castle And while John Cunningham is exploring Tony''s multiple personalities, he begins to experience personality problems of his own, as Jack Cannon beings to assert his own individuality.

Alex Winter and Deborah Tate arrive by hovercraft at the city of Babylon, lying on the river Euphrates in the Arizona desert. He is a sociology drop-out from the University of Oregon at Eugene who wants to become a Babylonian. She has a much stranger ambition. Their minds are babbling in the Greek that has been pumped into them via computer interface at the University of Heuristics. To them, English has yet to be invented and the young king Alexander lies dying in his palace. The city is dominated by the tower of Babel, its spiral roadway curling up towards the heavens and wide enough for several donkey carts. And women sit outside the Temple of Ishtar, waiting for some stranger to drop a coin in their laps. The prospect seems to fascinate Deborah. She wants to become one of the Whores of Babylon.

The final installment in the epic Inquisition War trilogy finds Jaq Draco hunted by Imperial and alien enemies across the ravaged universe, searching for the means to decipher the Eldar Book of Fate. Tempted to surrender to the powers of Darkness to find the answers, Jaq is haunted by the knowledge that, should he fail, the ultimate apocalypse awaits. Original.

This second collection of Watson''s short stories further demonstrates his seemingly inexhaustible imagination. In ''The Thousand Cuts'' the entire human race finds its consciousness blanked out for varying periods, but life seems somehow to have gone on in the missing days, and indeed, previously intractable problems have moved towards a solution. In ''Sunstroke'' a doctor blinded accidentally during the voyage to a seemingly benign new world becomes gradually aware of disturbing changes afflicting her sighted companions. These stories, and many others, confirm Watson''s place in the forefront of contemporary SF writers.

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative... In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ''An Appeal to Adolf'' tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ''Lover of Statues'' of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid - while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ''Hijack Holiday'', written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

Eugenio Barba is one of Europe''s leading theatre directors, at the forefront of experimental and group theatre for more than twenty years. Ian Watson provides the most comprehensive and systematic study of Barba''s work, including his training methods, dramaturgy, productions and theories, as well as his work at the International School of Theatre Anthropology.

The wholesale capture and distribution of knowledge over the last thirty years has created an unprecedented need for organizations to manage their knowledge assets. Knowledge Management (KM) addresses this need by helping an organization to leverage its information resources and knowledge assets by "remembering" and applying its experience. KM involves the acquisition, storage, retrieval, application, generation, and review of the knowledge assets of an organization in a controlled way. Today, organizations are applying KM throughout their systems, from information management to marketing to human resources. Applying Knowledge Management: Techniques for Building Corporate Memories examines why case-based reasoning (CBR) is so well suited for KM. CBR can be used to adapt solutions originally designed to solve problems in the past, to address new problems faced by the organization. This book clearly demonstrates how CBR can be successfully applied to KM problems by presenting several in-depth case-studies. Ian Watson, a well-known researcher in case-based reasoning and author of the introductory book, Applying CBR: Techniques for Enterprise Systems has written this book specifically for IT managers and knowledge management system developers.* Provides 7 real-world applications of knowledge management systems that use case-based reasoning techniques.* Presents the technical information needed to implement a knowledge management system.* Offers insights into the development of commercial KM CBR applications* Includes information on CBR software vendors, CBR consultants and value added resellers

When Saul and Diane save a wild rabbit from a hungry weasel in a quiet country lane, they inadvertently unleash the vengeance of a bloodthirsty, carnivorous force. Soon their sanity and their lives are at risk - as are the young people of a cell of the Animal Liberation Front with whom they join forces to learn the terrible secrets of their rural village. A visit to a battery chicken shed turns into an animal Auschwitz, where Saul is held prisoner. And a raid on a butcher''s shop brings to murderous life a full size model of the meatman which, armed with a butcher''s cleaver, goes hunting for blood and MEAT!

When a young British couple, who make jigsaw puzzles, are hired by an ageing Norwegian to take nude photos of themselves in a sculpture park in Oslo, they are drawn into a web of occult Nazi horror. Even more horrifying will be the fate of the whole world some years later if alien visitors achieve their secret aims. However, the aftermath of events in that Oslo park will provide Anna Sharman with a key to unlock those aims. Anna is a rebel within Britain''s intelligence service at a time when most of the world appeases the aliens because of the gifts they bring - and if she must lose her own body in order to discover the truth, she will do so.

The computer unlike other inventions is universal; you can use a computer for many tasks: writing, composing music, designing buildings, creating movies, inhabiting virtual worlds, communicating... This popular science history isn''t just about technology but introduces the pioneers: Babbage, Turing, Apple''s Wozniak and Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg. This story is about people and the changes computers have caused. In the future ubiquitous computing, AI, quantum and molecular computing could even make us immortal. The computer has been a radical invention. In less than a single human life computers are transforming economies and societies like no human invention before.

Charles Spark is an expert on body language, a bestselling author and a consultant (or walking lie detector) much in demand with industry and government. So when the aliens arrive, who better to join the team that will attempt to understand them? But even though these insectoid aliens - the "Flies" - in their pyramid-ship speak both English and Russian, they seem unreadable. "We have come to your planet to remember it," they say and at first they seem indeed to be a bizarre group of intergalactic tourists. When human beings start to interfere, things begin disappearing. The Dome of St Peter''s in Rome is the first to go, followed by downtown Prague, old Mombasa, Münich, the heart of New Orleans. In an effort to understand what has happened, Spark, and a strange group of pilgrims, embark on a bizarre journey to Mars - where the city of Münich has reappeared in a canyon. And where time, and memory, have become manifest.

Negotiating Cultures is a collection of essays and interviews that examines the role of cultural fusion, negotiation, and conflict in Eugenio Barba''s creative work, research, and theories about theatrical performance. Barba, one of Europe''s leading theatre artists, researchers, and theorists, has been at the cutting edge of the contemporary preoccupation with what Homi Bhabha calls the borders between cultures.

Lila Makindi grows up in East Africa in a peaceful and harmonious 22nd century world, which has succeeded our own age of extravagance, environmental damage, and warfare. Its citizens know that the Space Communications Administration, better known as Bardo, is guiding the planet benevolently, thanks to contact with wise aliens by means, not of grandiose spaceships, but of psychic travel powered by the sexual techniques of tantric yoga. Wonderfully, Lila is chosen for psychic starflight. But she discovers that in reality mental starflight is spinning a web of protection around the world to safeguard the human race from a malign alien energy force, the Starbeast. Yet is this the true reality? Only when Lila travels to Tibet does she discover the actual, unexpected purpose behind Bardo.