The Book of Ian Watson

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

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.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 375

Sample

“Always something new out of Africa,” said the Roman, Pliny. I lived in East Africa for two years. And what was new in fiction? The French nouveau roman. How Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of La Jalousie, would have loved to read the reports in The Standard, published in Dar es Salaam, of a peculiar misconceived murder trial up-country where fact and fiction were weirdly intermingled …

Under the hurricane lamp the policeman was turning the teacher’s effects over. The crowd had unfastened the teacher’s shirt and trousers greedily, ready hands had drawn them off, later they dressed him in a dirty white gown. The policeman removed the keys from the teacher’s pocket and went straightway to search his house. What did he hope to find there?



Holding the hurricane lamp up high the African watched his prisoner through the bars of the door. The American was still sitting in much the same position with his back against the wall and his eyes half-shut and his hands clasped in his lap.

‘Do you want anything?’

‘It feels so cold in here.’

‘It’s a hot night, you’re lucky.’

The hurricane lamp belonged on the table between the portrait of Julius K. Nyerere and the multicolour chart THE FLAGS OF AFRICA.



THE FLAGS OF AFRICA was the most important thing in the room.



What was Mauritania’s flag?

YELLOW CRESCENT & YELLOW STAR on GREEN. Senegal?

with a GREEN STAR in the CENTRE of the YELLOW HORIZONTAL.

Ivory Coast?

VERTICALS: ORANGE, WHITE, & GREEN. Upper Volta?

Congo (Kinshasa)?

A BAND OF RED lined with ORANGE BANDS

cutting DIAGONALLY across a BLUE BACKGROUND

from BOTTOM LEFT to TOP RIGHT

with an ORANGE STAR in the TOP LEFT CORNER.



‘To develop powers of observation and memory,’ wrote Assistant Inspector De Souza in the Tanzania Police Journal, ‘it is essential to set yourself tests more stringent than Rudyard Kipling ever devised for Kim. …



An act of pure cognition in an arbitrary medium.



Why shouldn’t Ivory Coast be BLACK and WHITE and RED, and Upper Volta ORANGE and WHITE and GREEN?



Lose a flag and you lose it in the rainbow, in the visible spectrum …

Togo?

with a LARGE RED SQUARE containing a WHITE STAR in the TOP LEFT extending down as far as the BASE of the CENTRE (GREEN) HORIZONTAL.

The two pictures on the teacher’s walls were a chaos of colours with no design, no horizontals, verticals, diagonals or stars. Maybe a madman painted them. One was full of blots of dull greens and browns with a single splash of orange at the top and it was like a flag in that respect, with its orange disc, but it had none of the integrity of a flag. It was a flag reflected in a rainy puddle. The other was a seasick swirl of greens and yellows and blues. It reminded him a little of the Central African Republic, though the colours were much more confused.



Affectionately the policeman spread the exercise books out on the table in the light of the hurricane lamp.



Niger?

with an ORANGE DISC in the very CENTRE.

Picking up the exercise books one by one, the policeman leafed through them, noting that the writing looked regular, thoughtful and neat, in some parts, but in other parts it looked frantic and misshapen as if the words had been tossed down on to the page where they broke and splashed and hung askew. A man’s handwriting was like a man’s voice. A man’s friends recognized the same voice whether he whispered, or sang out loud.

Two of the exercise books had lost their covers, two came from a stationery company in Chicago, the remaining three carried the name of the local Indian printing works. So he put them in this order provisionally, first the two that had lost their covers, then the two from Chicago, last the three from the Indian printers.

The difference between Sudan and Gabon?

Sudan had

Gabon had

What had Rwanda got that Guinea hadn’t got?

Rwanda and Guinea both had

VERTICALS: RED, YELLOW, & GREEN. But Rwanda also had

a BIG BLACK LETTER R’ in the CENTRE. What was the difference between Senegal and Mali? Senegal and Mali both had

VERTICALS: GREEN, YELLOW, & RED. But Senegal had

a GREEN STAR in the CENTRE. While Mali had

a BLACK MATCHSTICK MAN.

As he sat there, winged beetles dashed themselves through the bars on the windows at the roaring lamp, pattering down on to the exercise books, their wings crisped by the pillar of heat rising from the lamp chimney, their legs kicking in the air. Frantically they rotated on their polished shells and for long moments lay still in exhaustion. His sense of the flaglike neatness of the evidence was offended by the brittle caramel bodies littering it.



How many countries had stars?

Tunisia Morocco Algeria Mauritania Senegal Liberia Congo (Kinshasa) Cameroun Togo United-Arab-Republic Central-African-Republic Ghana Libya Somalia.

These stars were WHITE and BLACK and GREEN and YELLOW and RED, like the stars in the night sky. Tunisia and Algeria boasted of the RED STAR. Somalia Libya Liberia and Togo, strangely for African nations, bore WHITE STARS.



The policeman opened a packet of Ten Cent cigarettes, lit one from the lamp chimney, sucked smoke in. Abruptly he brushed the books clean of beetles with a sweep of his hand.

Over the bush, beyond the hills where the crime had taken place, a full yellow moon was rising. For a while longer he watched a line of fire creeping down one of the hillsides. He expelled smoke from his lungs in satisfaction into the night where the land also smoked in the moonlight. …



Inside the cell: anaesthesia, of the flesh against the cold cement; of the feelings, towards a dead woman who happened to have been his wife. …



‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ the teacher was shouting. ‘My wife is lying there right now. She’s hurt. She thinks I’m bringing help. Every second you delay me you’re hurting her. What do you think happened? You don’t think I … no that’s crazy. You must be crazy. You know me, I’m the teacher, I teach your sons and daughters. You don’t seriously think I … but I can see you do. You mustn’t. That’s wrong, awful wrong. You understand what I’m saying? Listen I wasn’t running away. Why should I do that! I was cycling for help. I hadn’t time to stop when you shouted. She may be dying in pain and fear all alone while we stand here arguing. You know I can’t run away even if I wanted to. Won’t you give me an answer? Haven’t you got an answer? Look at me, you all know who I am, I’m your teacher. Would the Government have put me in charge of your sons and daughters if there was the slightest shade of suspicion, any doubt at all? Have your children ever said anything was wrong? Don’t be afraid to say. You must speak out or hand me back my bicycle.’



‘We all saw him running away, racing off on his bicycle, bumping along the road like a drunk or madman. He fought like a madman too, see how my shirt’s torn. He didn’t say a word to us. He just fought. When we had him helpless, then he started to plead. But before that not a word of explanation!’

‘He was up there on the very top of the hill on that rock platform above the boulders. It was like a play that the mission children put on. She was dressed like one of the saints in white, he was the Devil tempting her. He stretched out his hand and showed her the whole world. A child could have understood. She fell as if she expected there would be soft pillows below not stones. …



‘He ran down the hillside with great leaps like an animal. I’m astonished he didn’t break his ankle. Leap, leap, leap, from one boulder to the next. Like the most agile antelope. I wouldn’t have dared those leaps in my young days. When he reached the bottom she was trying to stand up, hanging on by one of the boulders. He threw her down again and knelt astride her. He strangled her. I saw his two hands pressing her down while she struggled, then knotted round the neck. That’s when he picked up his bicycle, after he strangled her.’

‘I was hoeing my fields when I saw her falling. She fell over and over like a great white bird.’

‘But he didn’t strangle her. They were struggling and he picked up a small white stone and struck her on the side of the head with it over and over again till she lost her senses, and each time he took his hand away the stone was redder with blood than before. The stone was white like his hand then slowly it turned red.’



The policeman listened to them politely, sitting on the saddle of his bicycle, resting one foot on the ground for support.

When the sun touched the horizon, a bulging orange yolk, he had lowered the flag outside the police station, lamenting how sun-bleached and weather-stained it was. He locked the flag away in his cupboard and when he came outside again, the orange yolk had sunk without splitting, leaving a white wispy cloud behind like an albuminous cord still attached to it.

Up on the hilltop, on that rocky platform, the sun was still engaged in setting, was only now bulging out like the yolk that would flood the world.



Congo (Kinshasa)?

A BAND OF RED lined with ORANGE BANDS

cutting DIAGONALLY across a BLUE BACKGROUND

from BOTTOM LEFT to TOP RIGHT

with an ORANGE STAR in the top LEFT CORNER.



Quite natural that the farmer in his field, the witch skulking beneath a baobab tree, and the young catechist walking along the road reported seeing different events. How many citizens could say for sure whether the green triangle or the blue triangle was next to the flagstaff, on the flag he had just taken down? Yet they stood up for it and cheered it and saluted it.

He listened patiently with one foot resting on the ground. He didn’t get off his bicycle. Even when the American teacher shouted and struggled—the crowd kept a tight hold on him—he stayed seated. Important not to become personally involved in a sweaty struggle, important to control the situation in the way a traffic policeman controls cars, and that wasn’t by putting his shoulder to them and shoving.

Gabon?

To what extent could he trust the evidence of eyes that would swear the black diagonal (bordered with yellow) on their own national flag ran from top left to bottom right? (The shame of seeing the flag flown upside-down outside the Regional Commissioner’s Headquarters!) Lawyers tested the truthfulness of the witness by word of mouth, without ever testing his eyes. They should use THE FLAGS OF AFRICA:

an optical chart for illiterates.

‘We were bringing him to you to arrest him.’‘He was fleeing as if a devil …’

‘But we know how to deal with devils, don’t we old woman! We catch them and lock them up!’ The catechist spoke with venom.

The witch, wrapped up in her black buibui, stared through him. Her hands and feet looked like a model of their own bare veins and tendons. But if her arms and legs seemed skeletal in proportion to the voluminous buibui, she was balancing a heavy branch on her head.

Personally he didn’t believe in spirits infesting the air. A flag was the air made visible and there was nothing sinister in it, only stars and bands of colour, birds and a black sun.

But was it the same air as the witch breathed through her beak?



From the hilltop, the witch wasn’t visible, standing motionless in the shade of an elephantine baobab with a branch on her head. The tree towered over her with its crown of stiff white arms, a petrified squid. One of its fallen pods lay at her feet like a baby’s bald head with a few downy hairs. Fat black ants ran into a crack to fetch the sherbet clinging round the seeds.

A powder-blue and grey bird landed in the grit a few feet from her and rushed to right and left snatching up ants, each rush leading it closer to her.

She saw the woman in white appear behind the man on the hilltop. The man pointed at something far away with a casual gesture, and the woman stepped forward to see it. As she stepped forward …

The bird raced along another tangent, and entered the shade cast by the branch on her head. The witch suddenly spat into the sand just in front of the bird, startling it into the air …

The man stumbled towards the rock’s edge and regained his balance only by stepping behind the woman, hiding her from the witch’s gaze for a moment. Nevertheless the white dress was already billowing up around white kicking legs …

‘How did you get here so quick with that tree on your head? Maybe you changed yourself into a crow and flew here with it in your beak?’

The witch spat at the catechist’s feet and he hopped back quickly to avoid her spittle.

In her own mind maybe she did something, thought the policeman, but only in her own mind.

Chad?

VERTICALS: BLUE, YELLOW, & RED.

Gambia?

but the part of the BLUE HORIZONTAL was crossed by WHITE VERTICALS.

The farmer stepped back from his hoeing, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and saw stars as he poked the sweat from his eyes with his knuckles. Soon the field would be ready, the little rains would fall, seedlings would sprout in their beds, tall green tobacco would wave.

A huge white bird swooped down among the boulders.

Then he noticed the man racing crazily down the slope, and the bird turned into a white-frocked woman pulling herself laboriously upright with both hands, her face a small red blob of effort in the distance.



She fell billowing among the rocks, a white flag of surrender.



‘Don’t let her die all alone I beg you! If she dies all alone I’ll hold you responsible, I’ll always remember.’

But how much do you remember? Can you describe this nation’s flag from memory?



On the way up, she stopped to get her breath back beside an ants’ nest. It would be the most horrid death to be eaten alive by ants. Yet it was a punishment in Africa. The prisoner was covered with honey and staked out upon an antheap.

Her hands and ankles were bound tightly to the four stakes, her spine was arched above the heap like a bow, her belly to the sun. The blood ran to her head, the sun blinded her. She shut her eyes, but how long dare she keep them shut? The temptation to see the ants moving on to her body—as if seeing was controlling or anticipating—was so strong. But when the ants moved across her face her eyes would blink shut again instinctively. How long would her eyelids protect her eyes? How long would her eyelids continue to exist? She expelled the air from her lungs fiercely, snorting it out of her nostrils as if she’d just surfaced after swimming underwater for a long stretch—blowing like a sealion. But the ants boiled over her from the depths of their heap, their deep secret chambers and galleries where slaves toiled and herds of aphids dumbly grazed waiting for milking time, and where the pulsing heaps of eggs were packed. They boiled out, nipping the honey. She could bear this nipping fire on her body, but not her face. No not the face. The eyes. She thrashed her head from side to side in an effort to crush the ants, clenched her mouth tight to protect the tongue she will scream with later. She blinked her eyelids desperately and rolled her eyes. She opened her lips and sucked in ants to crush them. But how could she drink the boiling sea? The ants were no longer individuals that could be caught and crushed between her teeth or blown off her chin on to her chest, they were a surging black sea, a spreading fire, a roasting alive. They clothed her nudity in an acid suit. Her legs were spread wide apart by the stakes to let them feed on her sex. Fiercely she contracted her child-bearing muscles. Her whole body a flux of raw muscle. Surely she would die of exhaustion. She could hold her breath for two minutes while she swam underwater. Could she hold her breath while the ants ate her? When you are mad do you still feel the pain? Pain has to be faced. It’s a condition of being in this century. Everyone has to face the likelihood that one day she will be strapped on a table and a man in a rubber apron will come to her with instruments for twisting and screwing and burning, that one day she will bear a baby with her legs strapped together. One day it will happen, your life ends in a chaos of pain and mutilation and madness. And what happens to your psyche then, if the patterns of the mind are pain and terror at the end?

The pebble she had dropped on the mouth of their nest was already moving, lifting, tilting.

He was gazing out across the bush when she reached the summit. A fresh breeze brushed the top of the hill.

Before them the wild bush stretched out indefinitely studded with termite mounds, grey swollen baobabs and tall wooden cacti with dull green branches. Other hills like the one they stood on looked like the cores of tiny old volcanoes on a flat lunar surface where the gravity was not too strong. The sinking swollen sun silhouetted a few tiny wide-branched trees on distant ridges. Parts of the bush, where the lines of fire had passed, were charred ghostlands with clumps of black straw floating on a dust ocean.



The wild northern Masai with long knotted hair, bouncing earbangles, loping gait, and yellow calabashes full of blood and milk, were racing silently through the bush, their thoughts on death and cattle. It was the only high point of defence. They surged up the hill, leaping from boulder to boulder with great agility, ululating like a wind and casting long shiny spears that sparkled against the stones. …



Ghost spears and ghost raiders riding through the air, riding the breeze from the north across the burnt bush, where in the heat of the day they had taken the form of whirling dust devils. …



‘What a wonderful setting for the murder!’ she exclaimed. ‘But I wish there weren’t so many ants.’



A little way from the flat ochre stone her head rested on, lay a dark maroon handkerchief bunched into the shape of a fist.

Like a crumpled flag, the policeman thought.



He settled down to read the exercise books by the light of the hurricane lamp, chose one from the Indian Printers.

Opening it, he saw the title!



The Fall of Woman, or The Great African Murder Story.



Although Africa made me aware of the Third World, and of politics, it was Japan which dosed me with future shock and made me become a science fiction writer. Thirteen years after leaving Japan, the French magazine Actuel asked me and other writers to answer the following two questions. Which place has been magical in your life? And which was the worst rathole you visited? Here is my answer to the first question …

Just outside Kyoto is a remarkable and magical shrine: the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine, set upon Mount Inari in Fushimi Ward.

Well now, many Japanese shrines are remarkable places (not least the Shrine of Gratitude for Penis, at Tagata near Nagoya—which is full of enormous polished wooden phalluses!). And in a sense all Shinto shrines are magical. For in Japan two entirely different religions coexist (just as so much else which is apparently contradictory coexists there merrily). One is Shinto, an earth-religion, with its shrines. The other is Buddhism, a religion of the psyche, with its temples. The first is bodily, superstitious, mythic, ‘primitive’. The second is abstract, transcendental; and people switch from one to the other, as need be. It’s rather as though Europeans were Christians on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, and paid offerings to the Devil, of the old religion, on the other days.

This Inari shrine at Fushimi is dedicated to the gods of human prosperity; so at the Industrial Festival held there every April the Hall of Worship is full of offerings of industrial products: TV sets, video games, whatever … But the really mind-blowing thing isn’t the shrine buildings, nice as they are. Nor the sideshows and stalls selling barbecued sparrows, china foxes, masks with phallic noses and TV monster masks. It’s the 10,000 torii gateways, painted bright vermilion, packed shoulder to shoulder in a stone corridor that leads up the mountain and then around the top in a 4-kilometre-long circuit—through trees with a host of white paper bows tied to them for good fortune, like flocks of butterflies.

Climbing this mountain up the red stone corridor, with the sun shafting through, was a totally numinous experience for me. It was like being a corpuscle flowing through my own bloodstream externalised: a sensory event of far more impact than the calm elegance and aesthetic trance of the Buddhist Golden Pavilion in Kyoto itself; and during the 3 days of the New Year prosperity festival nearly two million people visit Fushimi, and this red corridor is dense with human corpuscles.

But I don’t like large crowds. But I don’t much care for earth-religions, which remind me of national soil and Nazism. But I have never actually set any story in Fushimi … So why is this place so numinous, and luminous, for me?

It’s because, while living in Japan, I found myself as a writer; and for me the shrine at Fushimi is a quintessence of Japan.

Japan switched me on to writing science fiction, the métier in which I found myself. I began writing SF as a psychological survival mechanism, for there in Japan (at the end of the Sixties) were all the seductions and all the terrors of the 21st century; Tokyo where I lived was the science fiction city.

But more importantly, in a deeper sense—I see now—Japan has a genius for making contradictions coexist (as Shinto and Buddhism coexist)—not least the contradiction between traditional past and futuristic present, between the calligrapher and the cyberneticist. Such places as the Inari shrine forced me to perceive analogies, to yoke together contradictions in a paradoxical knot—while at the same time deranging my senses through sheer visual impact.

Didn’t the New Year festival, with a ‘toothpaste tube’ of people squeezing up Mount Inari through the bloodstream corridor, resemble rush-hour on the Tokyo underground? Didn’t people accept the crush of life in megalopolis because the pursuit of economic growth had a quasi-religious flavour? Didn’t the Japanese accept the transformation of their land from a place of calm, beauty and nature, into a materialistic science fiction fantasy, precisely because there were deep traditional spiritual forces at work in this? Wasn’t the psychedelic art of the advertisers not simply a borrowing from the West, but a reincarnation of the garish fairground colours of Shinto?

In the first three books which I then set out to write, there were two features in common, as regards structure and flavour. Each book contained three very diverse, but intersecting plot-lines. And each book (or at least two of them—Japan itself features in the other one) juxtaposed the ancient or traditional (Amazonian Indians, the Incas) with something hypermodern (alien visitors, a trip to Mars).

The fusion of contradictions! And the reincarnation of ancient traditions in a futuristic setting!

I’d say that Japan rewired my brain to think this way—and rewired my emotions too, since to comprehend a place like the Inari Shrine cannot simply be a cerebral experience but must also be a sensuous and bodily one: a realization that this corridor of red gates is indeed a living bloodstream, belonging to an alien culture, true, but also at the same time for a while it was my own.

So perhaps I can say that Japan helped me to become an alien, by giving me a blood transfusion.

Let’s try my hand at a sort of haiku:

A Fushimi

Le sang montant

Vers les étoiles.



My first book was published in Japan, in a series of simple English readers aimed at high school and university students. We had flown our large, eccentric tabby cat out to Tokyo; and a Japanese modern classic is Natsume Soseki’s I am a Cat, in which a feline resident of the same ward of Tokyo as ours—Bunkyo Ward—observes the impact of modernisation upon Meiji Era Japan. My own Japan: A Cat’s Eye View relates a British cat’s insights into Japanese society in the late 1960s—and the little book has steadily sold thousands of copies ever since. Hence the fact that I had a publisher in the early, gestatory days described below …

We play imaginary cricket along the platform of the bullet-train station at Odawara, huge, empty and high. She bowls an imaginary ball, I hit with an imaginary bat. It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. The station is a high steel and glass causeway through the town and the red neon symbol of Marubutsu Department Store reflects in the glass, seems to brand the hill behind with a mystic emblem. One of the superexpresses appears far away at the end of the track, sending its sound waves ahead of it, zing-zing, zing-zing, rhythmic, climaxing in a booming whistle. The train speeds through the central tracks at a hundred miles an hour, lightning flickering from its overhead contacts, sucking our minds towards it. A high speed train empties itself visually of people. There’s only the train-skeleton, no human beings in it.

Can anyone see us from the train? Or is the platform a smooth white unit, stripped of even us? It’s been a puzzling day and we want to puzzle somebody. We arrived at the station on a bus whose conductress sang out all the way, at every stop and start and turn, ‘Awry … awry ….’ It’s the English phrase ‘all right’ turned into Japanese, seems intended as a tranquillizer; but it reminds us that far from being all right, something is awry in our sense of the word, something is all wrong … but we’re not sure what, can’t pin it down. We’ve seen a tattered international village, a reconstructed castle, a lioness with a tumour, views of Fuji. We’ve been round the ‘Golden Course’—a sequence of boiling sulphur springs, valleys, a lake. We’ve travelled by mountain-railway, cable-car, boat and bus. And we can’t say why on earth anyone should want to go round the Golden Course, yet we can’t say either what is wrong with the whole scene. Suspicions of something vastly wrong, a confidence trick (which reminds me of a science fiction story where the first spacemen discover that the moon is a huge facade with no far side—only scaffolding)—but you could note a million details and miss the synthesis; the day remains a great enigma.

It’s difficult to correlate your impressions in Japan. The whole tendency of Japanese culture is against correlation—and foreigners find it easy to lose themselves in details: ikebana, Zen, sumie, haiku. …

Is Japan complex, or simple? It’s in our nature to try to fit the jigsaw puzzle together; and this is impossible in Japan. Each experience insists on being separate. How to connect them? The Japanese don’t see it this way. We believe that what the world needs is generalists. We try to explain our sense of wrongness about this day on the Golden Course by reference to ecology, the life of the commuter, Shintoism. It’s our way of seeing. But we can’t buy a length of bamboo by indicating a bamboo brush and saying we only want the handle, not the head. A brush is a brush. Each item is a separate discrete unit. So the crowd-surge of a Shinto festival has got nothing to do with the subway-surge at rush-hour or with the activities of the Japan Travel Bureau, we’re told. Functions are separate; there’s no synthesis. And Japan is always a mirror-image of yourself. It’s your own politeness, your own aggression, your own sense of beauty, or of ugliness, that are projected back at you. Japan remains ambiguous. So we play imaginary cricket. What is the sound of one hand clapping? An imaginary cricket ball striking an imaginary cricket bat.

This year X Department Store sent its employees for their summer treat to the top of Mt Fuji. The employees brought back a couple of thousand cans of fresh air from the summit, which the store handed out to the public as an advertising gimmick. ‘Today’s oxygen is sponsored by X Department Store.’ Because if somebody doesn’t sponsor it, there won’t be any? Air is no longer an aspect of Nature (what is Nature? I’ve forgotten), it’s an economic casualty.

We live in a small house on a hillside looking towards central Tokyo. We can see Tokyo Tower, a few feet higher than the Eiffel Tower, and the Kasumigaseki Building—Japan’s first skyscraper, and hero of a recent movie, since the building of such a skyscraper. . .