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Ian Watson
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 Ian Watson is the finest young hard science fiction writer and one of the most acute and perceptive
sf critics to emerge in England during the last two decades. His first novel,
The Embedding (1973), was a rigorous hard sf novel about linguistics. It was followed rapidly by a string of novels and stories that were
often more notable for their literary effects, political commitment, and wild imagination than for serious
scientific extrapolation. They were characteristically metaphysical in their speculation. Watson was and remains
a maverick outsider playing with genre conventions in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, interested in all
the sciences and indeed all knowledge, and occasionally turning his attention to hard science fiction. He is a
generational contemporary of Gregory Benford and holds a similar position in the U.K. to Benford's in
the American field, as a writer who brought new levels of literary technique and characterization to hard sf.
But Watson has never committed himself as exclusively to hard sf as has Benford.
"The Very Slow Time Machine" (1978) is a remarkable combination of hard science ideas presented
in an almost Besterian rapid-fire delivery, and an ironic examination of religious fervor and messianic
metaphysics. Time travel fiction, a standard of science fiction since H. G. Wells' famous novella in 1895, invites us
to consider logical paradoxes; it is often related to mathematical sf in the kind of intellectual play offered.
And this is another scientific report format story, like Le Guin's "Author of the Acacia Seeds," told from the point
of view of a researcher in the world of the story, which lends verisimilitude and additional realism to this
quite outrageous speculation. This is one of Watson's best pieces, and shows his command of the traditions
and tropes of hard sf, but with a bad attitude. The fusion of Besterian (and Ballardian -- the division into
dated sections would have been read as "New Wave" in the 70s) techniques and the logic of hard science yields
an unorthodox and discomfiting power to Watson's fiction. It is interesting to compare this story to Dick's
"The Indefatigable Frog" or Benford's "Relativistic Effects," other treatments of the human effects of distorted
time, or to Rucker's "Ms. Found in a Copy of Flatland," as a story of entrapment.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.