New Releases by Ian Watson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In another world, somewhere in space and time, two countries - Bellogard and Chorny - are locked in perpetual war, conducted by magic. Each of the main members of the two countries'' courts - king, queen, prince, bishop, knight and squire - has their own form of magic, and special ways of moving magically. A war may continue for centuries, until one side succeeds in killing the other side''s king, at which point the whole world vanishes, only to reappear and have the cycle begin again. . . Pedino is a young Bellogardian who becomes the queen''s squire and, as part of his training, is sent into a seedier part of the city to uncover a Chornian spy. During his adventures he meets and falls in love with a whore, Sara, who turns out to be a Chornian bishop''s squire. Pedino succeeds in killing the other Chornian bishop - a remarkable achievement for a mere squire; but in the manoeuvres which follow Chorny proves to have outwitted its rival, and Pedino''s whole world is threatened with extinction. There have been many stories modelled on chess games, but none so ingenious and enjoyable as Ian Watson''s latest novel. And, as one would expect from Watson, the story of Bellogard and Chorny is only the beginning. When Pedino and Sara manage to escape the destruction of their universe, they find themselves in a series of even more bizarre worlds operating under still stranger rules, as they seek to discover the purpose of their existence, and the meaning of their universe. Queenmagic, Kingmagic is Ian Watson in sparkling, exuberant form.

Where do the metal death gliders come from? To the glass-sailors of the five villages the slow birds that inched over the Earth at shoulder height, appearing and vanishing, were a mystery - until young Daniel climbed aboard one of the scarred Missiles and vowed to find out where it went Ian Watson''s third short story collection is his best yet: a brilliant array of original and imaginative inventions that plunge the reader into strangely familiar new worlds.

When she was a young girl Lucky belonged to a space-going mining commune which came upon an asteroid whose caves concealed the bones of serpentine aliens and humanoids. It was Lucky who discovered that the rock was an Ukko, a mysterious entity which would respond to stories told to it. Centuries later Lucky, altered by the Ukko, is still alive, though capricious and sometimes crazy. By mating with her, her consort Bertel has had his life prolonged for centuries, as will the men who first bed her daughters - Lucky''s harvest.

The second and concluding volume of Ian Watson''s extraordinary epic, The Book of Mana. Kaleva is Earth''s first and only interstellar colony, discovered by Lucky Sariola who was transported there by an Ukko, a mysterious asteriod-like entity that responds to stories told to it - in Lucky''s case, those of her Finnish grandmother. Now Queen Lucky, half-mad and newly widowed, is obsessed by relocating that Ukko - but this is potentially disastrous, as the snakelike alien Isi are also on its trail as part of their design to enslave humans. Understanding this, one of Lucky''s daughters (with obsessions of her own) crowns herself rival queen. A summer turns into unseasonable winter and elysian peace turns to bitter civil war and Ukko, once more, has a role to play in the history of Kaleva.

In 1890 the Russian author Chekhov undertook an historic journey across Siberia to the convict island of Sakhalin. A hundred years later, in an isolated artist''s retreat, a Soviet film unit prepares to commemorate his journey by using a technique that will cause their chosen actor to not only play the role of the playwright, but to believe that he is Chekhov. But the situations Mikhail acts out diverge wildly from known biographical facts when Chekhov hears of an explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. Yet the real Tunguska explosion occurred in 1908 - so how could Chekhov have possible heard of it in 1890?

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 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!

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 Three Laws of Feministics: 1. Your body is not your own; it belongs to another. Therefore you may not damage it nor, through inaction, allow it to be damaged. 2. You must obey all orders given you by your owner (or in cases of loss of ownership, by any man) even if such orders conflict with the First Law. 3. You may not injure any man, nor through failure to comply with the Second Law, cause him displeasure or mental injury. Women as chattels, as customised sexslaves; bodies freakishly modified to their owners'' dictates, personalities preset to order. Welcome to the world of the Orgasmachine. But Jade and Mari escape their masters and dream of revenge, of revolution, of freedom.

"Military public relations endeavors ultimately seek to build a sense of common interests and aims, and so generally foster good relations with the people they defend, and there in ensure a stable society. The armed forces when engaging on any public relations exercise, have traditionally sought to provide an entertaining spectacle. For years this has been typified by parades, bands, mock battles, drill displays and other relevant feats of military prowess which have captured the imagination of the public and inspired potential recruits. The 20th Century brought a new dimension to the field of warfare and subsequently added a new strand to the fabric of public ceremony and displays by the armed forces. That new dimension was the arrival of powered flight.Display flying began within five years of the Wright Brothers making their milestone first flight. The first events staged in Britain which centered on demonstrations by flying machines, were organized by the town councils of Blackpool and Doncaster and were held within days of each other in October 1909. 1920 was the year that the first of the famed and legendary Hendon Air Pageants was staged, and this is where military air shows traditionally began. The Hendon Displays were organized and staged by the still fledging Royal Air Force and it was probably due in no small part to the prestige and spectacle of this fresh new dimension of military pageantry, together with other like events held at RAF airfields through the next two decades, that the very existence of the RAF was saved from the threat of abolition. The history of the RAF''s commitment (one that compares almost uniquely with other air forces) toward display flying through the years after World War II has now come of age. This account of their record in this often overlooked but then again traditional field of military customs, describes and illustrates the major public RAF events since 1920."

Every short story in this wonderfully varied collection has one thing in common: each features some alteration in history, some divergence from historical reality, which results in a world very different from the one we know today. As well as original stories specially commissioned from bestselling writers such as James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod, there are genre classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson''s story of how World War II atomic bomber the Enola Gay, having crashed on a training flight, is replaced by the Lucky Strike with profoundly different consequences. Praise for the editors: ''Mr Watson wreaks havoc with what is accepted - and acceptable.'' The Times ''One of Britain''s consistently finest science fiction writers.'' New Scientist

Fictional comedy drama set in the English holiday town of Blackpool in the off season. A very funny, fast-paced plot that contains sex, drugs, violence, gangsters and plenty of laughs as a teenage boy gets into a world of grief and very dangerous people when all he wanted was to impress the girl of his dreams.

Recorded at Olympic Sound Studios, London, The Rolling Stones'' seminal album of 1968, "Beggars Banquet", was regarded as marking a return to form for the group - going back to their rhythm and blues roots with tracks such as "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Street Fighting Man". The latest in a challenging series which focuses on the recording sessions that set new standards and changed the course of musical history, this is essential reading for any Stone fan.

A fascinating true story of a white boy''s thoughts and adventures growing up in the dark years of African apartheid, and of his daring escape to the American dream.

En la galaxia desgarrada por la guerra del cuadragésimo primer milenio, la sagrada Inquisición libra una lucha interminable para proteger a la humanidad de la corrupción de los Poderes Oscuros. Desolado por la muerte de su aliada más cercana, el inquisidor renegado Jaq Draco se prepara para entregar su alma a los dioses del Caos y así lograr descubrir el lugar mítico donde el tiempo vuelve atrás y los muertos pueden alzarse de nuevo. Sólo mediante la renuncia a su fe inquebrantable en el Dios Emperador puede lograr ese objetivo...¡y una eternidad de condenación!