Ian Watson

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Ian Watson (2009)

Ian Watson (born April 20, 1943 in St Albans ) is a British science fiction writer.

Life

Ian Watson grew up as an only child in North Shields and attended King's School in Tynemouth from 1948 to 1959 . In addition to classical literature, he read a lot of science fiction, but without taking this genre too seriously.

In 1962 he married the painter Judy Jackson, a year before he graduated from Balliol College , Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature . With a thesis on the influence of French authors on Walter Pater , he received the Master of Arts in 1965 . He then worked until 1967 at the University College of Dar es Salaam as a lecturer . From 1967 to 1970 Watson lectured on English literature at various universities in Tokyo . The chaotic conditions there, caused by technology and pollution , prompted him to turn seriously to science fiction.

From 1970 he lived in Oxford , lectured at the Birmingham Polytechnic in Future Studies (which also included science fiction), experimented with LSD and, encouraged by his colleagues, dealt with social anthropology and linguistics . In 1973 he became the father of a daughter.

The success of his first two published novels, The Embedding, which won the Prix ​​Apollo in 1975, and The Jonah Kit, for which he won the British Science Fiction Award in 1978, led him to become a full-time writer in 1976 .

In 1979 he moved to a small village in Northamptonshire . In the 1980s he was involved in the Labor Party (for which he ran in parliamentary elections) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament . His wife Judy died on April 14, 2001 at the age of 61 from complications from pulmonary emphysema .

plant

For his first novel, he was inspired by short texts by his wife, which he expanded into an erotic satire entitled The Woman Factory . The plan to get it out in the Olympia Press came to nothing when the publisher went bankrupt. To date, the novel has only been published in French and, in a revised version, in Japanese translation.

The Embedding is based on ideas from Generative Grammar . On the basis of extraterrestrials who visit earth in search of new linguistic approaches to reality, the question is addressed here, among other things, to what extent language influences experience and consciousness and what it says about those who speak it.

In The Jonah Kit is about experiments in which human consciousness is transferred to whales. In Miracle Visitors , a connection is made between UFO experiences and mystical experiences. Under hypnosis, a psychology student reports on an alien abduction and mentions names his professor knows from the prophetic books of William Blake .

Watson also wrote the novels God's World and The Flies of Memory and several collections of short stories. The theme of perception, the question of the true nature of things and the search for transcendence occur again and again in these works. Watson also worked on the short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss for Stanley Kubrick into a script that eventually became the basis for Steven Spielberg's film AI - Artificial Intelligence .

In 1980 he wrote the novel Under Heaven's Bridge with Michael Bishop . He has also written a series of novels set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe : Space Marine and the Inquisition War trilogy of Inquisitor, Harlequin and Chaos Child.

The Finnish national epic Kalevala inspired him to write The Book of Mana, in his own words the "most ambitious (and most extensive) novel (...) I have ever dared to write".

Together with the Italian author Roberto Quaglia , Watson has been writing erotic-satirical short stories since 2003, which have been published in various anthologies and magazines (including Weird Tales ) and which will appear collectively in spring 2009 under the title The Beloved of My Beloved .

Awards

bibliography

Warhammer 40,000 ( RPG tie-ins )
Novels
Collections
Anthologies (as editor)
Books for Young English Learners
  • Japan: A Cat's Eye View (1969)
  • Japan Tomorrow (1977)

literature

Lexicons

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Bernhard Kempen in epilog: Ian Watson - British writer (* 1943) ( Memento from April 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ a b c d e Ian Watson: Dancing on a Tightrope . September 23, 1988
  3. ↑ a b Ian Watson website: Biography , accessed October 28, 2018.
  4. ^ A b c d John Clute , Peter Nicholls : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . St. Martin's Press, New York 1993, ISBN 1-85723-124-4
  5. ↑ See Heyne Science Fiction Magazin # 1, ed. by Wolfgang Jeschke , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-453-30777-1 , p. 304.
  6. ↑ Quantum Cosmos: News about Ian Watson
  7. ^ Ian Watson: Epilogue to the Japanese translation . 2001, accessed October 28, 2018.
  8. ↑ epilog: Bernhard Kempen in conversation with Ian Watson ( Memento from May 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). May 22, 1999
  9. ^ Ian Watson in The New York Review of Science Fiction: Plumbing Stanley Kubrick . May 2000; abridged in Playboy : My Adventures with Stanley Kubrick . August 1999
  10. ↑ Ian Watson in epilog: How I Stole the Sampo ( Memento of October 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ^ Roberto Quaglia's website: Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia
  12. ↑ The Beloved of My Beloved website
personal data
SURNAME Watson, Ian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British science fiction writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH St Albans