Search Worlds Without End

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ian Watson and Pamela Sargent
• The American Book of the Dead - novelette by Jody Scott
• Time of Passage - (1964) - shortstory by J. G. Ballard
• Of Space-Time and the River - (1985) - novelette by Gregory Benford
• Out of My Head - novelette by James E. Gunn
• A Work of Art - (1956) - novelette by James Blish
• The Rapture - poem by Thomas M. Disch
• Wood - novelette by Michael N. Langford
• A Woman's Life - shortstory by W. Warren Wagar
• Into That Good Night - novelette by James A. Stevens
• Prometheus's Ghost - novelette by Chet Williamson
• Small Change - (1982) - shortstory by Ursula K. Le Guin
• A Draft of Canto CI - shortstory by Carter Scholz
• Dust - novelette by Mona A. Clee
• Diary of a Dead Man - shortstory by Michael Bishop
• Fair Game - novelette by Howard Waldrop
• In Frozen Time - shortstory by Rudy Rucker
• Tropism - shortstory by Leigh Kennedy
• If Ever I Should Leave You - (1974) - shortstory by Pamela Sargent
• Time's Hitch - poem by Robert Frazier
• The Rooms of Paradise - (1978) - shortstory by Ian Watson
• Checking Out - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• The Region Between - (1970) - novella by Harlan Ellison

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.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Conqueror Fantastic (2004), edited by Pamela Sargent. The story is included in the colledtions The Butterflies of Memory (2004) and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

Deathhunter opens with a rapidly and often wittily sketched utopia, containing the expected hints of something rotten. The Good Life has resulted from the philosophy of the good death: the creed is that after death there's nothing, that you vanish like a turned-off TV picture, that the proper end of life is calm acceptance of oblivion ("you should go gently into that good night"). Psychiatrists have become "death guides" leading the aged and sick into this approved frame of mind -- without fear, without hope -- before voluntary euthanasia. It is trumpeted that with fear of death abolished, war and other evils have vanished too; at the same time it's quietly made plain that little things like poetry and the creative arts in general have likewise bitten the dust. Even scientific research into the possibility of an afterlife is taboo, since the findings might shake the wobbly dogmas of the Houses of Death....

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.

Table of Contents:

• Cold Light - (1986) - novelette
• When the Timegate Failed - (1985) - novelette
• The Great Atlantic Swimming Race - (1986) - short story
• The Wire Around the War - (1985) - short story
• When Idaho Dived - (1985) - short story
• On the Dream Channel Panel - (1985) - short story
• The People on the Precipice - (1985) - short story
• Skin Day, and After - (1985) - short story
• Windows - (1986) - novelette
• Evil Water - novelette

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 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.

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.

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.

Table of Contents:

• Salvage Rites
• The Moon and Michelangelo
• Jewels in an Angel's Wing
• The Legend of the Seven Who Found the True Egg of Lightning
• Hyperzoo
• Letters from the Monkey Alphabet
• Day of the Wolf
• The Mole Field
• The Emir's Clock
• Lost Bodies
• Samathiel's Summons
• Aid from a Vampire
• When Jesus Comes Down the Chimney
• The Resurrection Man
• Joan's World

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2006. It can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collections Saving for a Sunny Day (2012), and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1983. The story can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (1984), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Best Science Fiction of the Year #13 (1984), edited by Terry Carr, The Nebula Awards #19 (1984), edited by Marta Randall and The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (1989), Edward L. Ferman. It is included in the collections Slow Birds and Other Stories (1985) and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

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.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: In the Hothouse - (1985) - essay
• Slow Birds - (1983) - novelette
• The Width of the World - (1983) - shortstory
• White Socks - (1985) - novelette
• Ghost Lecturer - (1984) - shortstory
• Mistress of Cold - (1984) - shortstory
• In the Mirror of the Earth - (1983) - shortstory
• Cruising - (1983) - shortstory
• Universe on the Turn - (1984) - shortstory
• The Flesh of Her Hair - (1984) - shortstory
• The Mystic Marriage of Salome - (1981) - shortstory
• The Bloomsday Revolution - (1984) - shortstory

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.

Contents:

• The Rooms of Paradise - (1978) - short story
• Nightmares - (1981) - short story
• Returning Home - short story
• Bud - (1980) - short story
• The Milk of Knowledge - (1982) - novelette
• Peace - (1982) - short story
• Jean Sandwich, the Sponsor, and I - (1981) - short story
• A Letter from God - (1981) - short story
• Insight - (1980) - short story
• To the Pump Room with Jane - (1975) - short story
• Flame and the Healer - (1982) - short story
• The Call of the Wild: The Dog-Flea Version - (1981) - short story
• The Artistic Touch - (1981) - short story
• The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080 - (1980) - short story
• Sunstroke - short story
• The Thousand Cuts - (1982) - short story

The Times once wrote that 'Mr Watson's short stories are spring-loaded with effect, compressed with a drama that, in others, might take a novel to eke out' while the Times Literary Supplement went three better: 'Many of his stories contain enough intellectual substance to fuel a trilogy'--consequently this first-ever collection of his best stories might be the equivalent of 72 books.

In 'An Appeal to Adolf' the Third Reich invades England by way of very long battleships bridging the Channel, while two gay sailors fret about the Führer's hatred for Wittgenstein. In 'The Great Escape' rebel angels set Hell in motion towards a very distant God, planning to harpoon the deity. 'Swimming with the Salmon' tells of the seduction by pheromones of a Scottish priestess who looks after genetically engineered superfish; while in 'The Moon and Michelangelo' a stone mason from Oxford achieves a petrifying transcendence on an alien planet. In Jerusalem a gate opens to a domain of inexplicable beings; while in ancient Babylon, recreated in the Arizona desert, immigrants from our own time encounter strange destinies. Here is science fiction of the highest calibre, and horror too, while other stories are surreally fantastical.

So as to cut to the cream, this selection by the author is guided by public opinion in the form of nominations for awards, inclusion in 'best of the year' anthologies as well as in other reprint volumes, and the number of translations over the years, although he has also slipped in some of his own less acknowledged favourites. Altogether this is an amazing showcase of treasures spanning 30 years from Ian Watson's pen (and typewriter, and computer).

Table of Contents:

• The Very Slow Time Machine
• The World Science Fiction Convention of 2080
• The Thousand Cuts
• Slow Birds
• We Remember Babylon
• The People on the Precipice
• Ahead!
• Cold Light
• Salvage Rites
• The Moon and Michelangelo
• The Emir´s Clock
• Lost Bodies
• Stalin´s Teardrops
• The Eye of the Ayatollah
• Swimming with the Salmon
• The Coming of Vertumnus
• The Bible in Blood
• The Great Escape
• One of Her Paths
• The Black Wall of Jerusalem
• A Speaker for the Wooden Sea
• An Appeal to Adolf
• Giant Dwarfs
• Saving for a Sunny Day, or The Benefits of Reincarnation
• Story Notes

Additional material for the deluxe edition:

• The Name of the Lavender
• The 1000 Year Reich
• Red Squirrel
• Story Notes

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.

Table of Contents:

• The Flags of Africa
• Shrines and Ratholes (Part I)
• Imaginary Cricket
• Roof Garden Under Saturn
• Towards an Alien Linguistics
• The False Braille Catalogue
• The Love Song of Johnny Alienson
• The Crudities of Science Fiction
• The Big Buy
• Who Can Believe in the Hero(ine)?
• Showdown on Showdown
• UFOs, Science and the Inexplicable
• Horrorscope
• Some Sufist Insights into the Nature of Inexplicable Events
• Dome of Whispers
• Down the Mine
• A Cage for Death
• Up the Pole
• Shrines and Ratholes (Part II)
• The President's Not for Turning
• Hype Hype Hooray!
• The Real Winston
• April in Paris
• Some Cultural Notes and Pest Control
• The Culling
• The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle

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...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - (2006) - essay by Paul J. McAuley
• An Appeal to Adolf - (2004) - shortstory
• The Black Wall of Jerusalem - (2002) - novelette
• A Free Man - (2002) - novelette
• A Speaker for the Wooden Sea - (2002) - novella
• The Navigator's Tale - (2005) - shortstory
• Hijack Holiday - (2001) - shortstory
• Alicia - (2002) - shortstory
• Separate Lives - (2003) - shortstory n
• The Grave of My Beloved - (2006) - shortstory with Roberto Quaglia
• Man of Her Dreams: A Romance - (2003) - shortstory
• Barking Mad - (2003) - shortstory
• The Butterflies of Memory - (2003) - shortstory
• One of Her Paths - (2001) - novella
• Starry Night - (1998) - shortstory
• Giant Dwarfs - (2005) - novelette
• How to Be a Fictionaut: Chapter 19: Safety Check - (1996) - shortstory
• Lover of Statues - (2005) - shortstory
• Story Notes - (2006) - essay

This novella originally appeared in Interzone, #56 February 1992. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections The Coming of Vertumnus and Other Stories (1994) and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

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.

Table of Contents:

• The Coming of Vertumnus - (1992) - novella
• Swimming with the Salmon - (1992) - short story
• The Bible in Blood - novelette
• Happy Hour - (1990) - novelette
• The Talk of the Town - (1991) - short story
• Looking Down on You - (1992) - short story
• The Tale of Peg and the Brain - (1992) - short story
• Life in the Groove - (1992) - short story
• Virtually Lucid Lucy - (1992) - short story
• The Odour of Cocktail Cigarettes - (1991) - short story
• Nanoware Time - (1989) - novella

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Other Edens (1987), edited by Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (1988), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections Salvage Rites and Other Stories (1989) and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

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 research establishment, and turns up in Tokyo, he presents a major problem for American security officials. The youth appears to be part of a sophisticated experiment--and to have the mind of a supposedly dead astronaut perfectly imprinted on his own. And, the boy claims the tests have been extended to a whale. As these strange events unfold, other cataclysmic events begin to occur too: a groundbreaking Nobel Prize winner proves that what we perceive as the universe is nothing more than a ghost of the real thing. Then the whales begin singing their death-mantra throughout the world's oceans.

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.

Table of Contents:

• The Raft of the Titanic - short fiction by James Morrow
• Sidewinders - short fiction by Ken MacLeod
• The Wandering Christian - (1991) - novelette by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne
• Hush My Mouth - (1986) - short story by Suzette Haden Elgin
• A Letter from the Pope - (1990) - novelette by Harry Harrison and Tom Shippey
• Such a Deal - short fiction by Esther M. Friesner
• Ink from the New Moon - (1992) - short story by A. A. Attanasio
• Dispatches from the Revolution - (1991) - novelette by Pat Cadigan
• Catch That Zeppelin! - (1975) - short story by Fritz Leiber
• A Very British History - (2000) - short story by Paul J. McAuley
• The Imitation Game - (2008) - short story by Rudy Rucker
• Weihnachtabend - (1972) - novelette by Keith Roberts
• The Lucky Strike - (1984) - novelette by Kim Stanley Robinson
• His Powder'd Wig, His Crown of Thornes - (1989) - short story by Marc Laidlaw
• Roncesvalles - (1990) - novelette by Judith Tarr
• The English Mutiny - (2008) - novelette by Ian R. MacLeod
• O One - (2003) - short story by Chris Roberson
• Islands in the Sea - (1989) - novelette by Harry Turtledove
• Lenin in Odessa - (1990) - short story by George Zebrowski
• The Einstein Gun - short fiction by Pierre Gévart (trans. of Comment les choses se sont vraiment passées)
• Tales from the Venia Woods - (1989) - short story by Robert Silverberg
• Manassas, Again - (1991) - short story by Gregory Benford
• The Sleeping Serpent - (1992) - novella by Pamela Sargent
• Waiting for the Olympians - (1988) - novelette by Frederik Pohl
• Darwin Anathema - short story by Stephen Baxter

War is becoming increasingly 'SF-ized' with remotely controlled attack drones and robot warriors already in development and being tested. Over the past 100 years the technology of war has advanced enormously in destructive power, yet also in sophistication so that we no longer seem to live under the constant threat of all-out global thermonuclear cataclysm. So what will future wars be like? And what will start them: religion, politics, resources, refugees, or advanced weaponry itself?

Watson and Whates present a gripping anthology of SF stories which explores the gamut of possible future conflicts, including such themes as nuclear war, psychological and cyberwars, enhanced soldiery, mercenaries, terrorism, intelligent robotic war machines, and war with aliens.

All the stories in this collection of remarkable quality and diversity reveals humankind pressed to the limits in every conceivable way.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Ian Whates and Ian Watson
• Peacekeeper - shortstory by Brad R. Torgersen and Mike Resnick
• From Out of the Sun, Endlessly Singing - shortstory by Simon R. Green
• All for Love - (1962) - shortstory by Algis Budrys
• The War Artist - (2011) - shortstory by Tony Ballantyne
• The War Memorial - (1995) - shortstory by Allen Steele
• Politics - (1990) - novelette by Elizabeth Moon
• Arena - (1944) - novelette by Fredric Brown
• Peacekeeping Mission - (2008) - shortstory by Laura Resnick
• The Peacemaker - (1964) - shortstory by Fred Saberhagen
• Junked: A Combat K Adventure - (2009) - shortfiction by Andy Remic
• The Liberation of Earth - (1953) - shortstory by William Tenn
• A Clean Escape - (1985) - shortstory by John Kessel
• Storming Hell - (2009) - novelette by John Lambshead
• Solidarity - (2005) - novella by Walter Jon Williams
• The Price - (2010) - novelette by Michael Z. Williamson
• The Horars of War - (1970) - shortstory by Gene Wolfe
• The Traitor - (1997) - novelette by David Weber
• The Game of Rat and Dragon - (1955) - shortstory by Cordwainer Smith
• Caught in the Crossfire - (1978) - shortstory by David Drake
• The Rhine's World Incident - (2008) - shortstory by Neal Asher
• Winning Peace - (2007) - novelette by Paul J. McAuley
• Time Piece - (1970) - shortstory by Joe Haldeman
• The Wake - (2011) - shortstory by Dan Abnett
• The Pyre of New Day - novelette by Catherine Asaro

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.

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, #2 November 2006. It can also be found in the anthology Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine (2007), edited by Sean Wallace and Nick Mamatas.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology Anticipations (1978), edited by Christopher Priest. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year #8 (1979), edited by Terry Carr, The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (2013), edited by Mike Ashley. It is included in the collections The Very Slow Time Machine: Science Fiction Stories (1979) and The Best of Ian Watson (2014).

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...

Table of Contents:

• The Very Slow Time Machine - (1978) - novelette
• Thy Blood Like Milk - (1973) - novelette
• Sitting on a Starwood Stool - (1974) - shortstory
• Agoraphobia, A.D. 2000 - (1977) - shortstory
• Programmed Love Story - (1974) - shortstory
• The Girl Who Was Art - (1976) - shortstory
• Our Loves So Truly Meridional - (1975) - shortstory
• Immune Dreams - (1978) - shortstory
• My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl - (1978) - shortstory
• The Roentgen Refugees - (1977) - shortstory
• A Time-Span to Conjure With - (1978) - shortstory
• On Cooking the First Hero in Spring - (1975) - shortstory
• The Event Horizon - (1976) - novelette

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.

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.

Yaleen always wanted to join the boating guild and become a riverwoman. It was the most important role for a woman in her world. The boats sailed up and down the eastern shore, from Tambimatu in the south (where the river emerged from the base of the unclimbable Far Precipices) to the sea in the north. Only women could travel the river. A man was allowed on trip, with his wife-to-be, but if he dared set foot on a boat again the black current would call him to his death. It was the black current, too, which made the river impossible to cross. It ran the whole length of the waterway - gelatinous, mysterious, and alive. On the western bank lived other people who could sometimes be seen through telescopes, but they appeared to be male-dominated savages. When she was accepted in the Guild, Yaleen little suspected that she was embarking upon a course which before long would take her across to the western shore, and into the heart of the black current itself.

Ian Watson's novel is perhaps the most colourful and enjoyable he has written. Set on a strange distant planet, it offers a feast of mystery and dramatic incident.

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...

Yaleen the Riverwoman tries to use the power of the Black Current to convince her people that the Godmind plans to destroy their world

-or-

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.

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.

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 the aftermath of the bloody suppression of an alien-influenced rebellion, Inquisitor Jaq Draco discovers a bizarre entity that may prove to be the salvation of mankind or be the means of it's destruction. Declared a renegade of the Imperium Draco, his assassin consort and a Space Marine trek the galaxy in search of the mysterious Black Library and information that can overcome the conspiracy around them.

• 9 - Introduction (The Inquisition War) - (2004) - essay
• 13 - The Alien Beast Within - [Inquisition War] - (1990) - novelette
• 49 - Draco - [Inquisition War - 1] - (1990) - novel (variant of Inquisitor)
• 233 - Warped Stars - [Inquisition War] - (1990) - novella
• 275 - Harlequin - [Inquisition War - 2] - (1994) - novel
• 511 - Chaos Child - [Inquisition War - 3] - (1995) - novel

While working to suppress a rebellion, Inquisitor Jac Draco discovers not only a bizarre entity but also a deadly secret conspiracy of ruthless inquitors who are out to seize control of every human being on the planet.

Rebel Jaq Draco, a former loyal inquisitor, must join forces with a deadly assassin-courtesan and an insane navigator to battle against clever aliens, secret agents, and Harlequin player-warriors to save the galaxy from a psychic doomsday conspiracy.

Devastated by the death of his closest friend, renegade Inquisitor Jac Draco renounces his fanatical faith in the God-Emperor and surrenders himself to the dark powers of Chaos in the hope of raising his friend from death.

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. Fiercely intelligent, energetic and challenging, it immediately established Watson as a writer of rare power and vision, and is now recognized as a modern classic.

An unusually brilliant and mind-stretching metaphysical quest from one of the most exciting talents in science fiction.

John Deacon uses hypnosis to help his patients reach altered states of consciousness. One of his subjects, Michael Peacocke, is unusually susceptible and in their first session together, Michael recalls a "close encounter"--in both senses of the term--with an alien. Deacon, skeptical of the story, dismisses it as an adolescent sexual fantasy. But then strange things begin to happen and Deacon is forced to reconsider. Could UFOs be symbols projected from the collective unconscious? Are they messages from the biomatrix? Does the mind have the ability to project objects and people that are physically real...yet somehow illusory?

A wonderfully fascinating, mind-bending voyage.

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?

Nanowire Time:

The Persistence of Vision:

In a 1990s buffeted with crises, the narrator, lacking any meaning to his life, finds a happy community of deaf-blinds. This story is a quest for the trancendant, couched in a questioning of whether physical disabilities can free people from the mundane.