Ian Watson (born 1943) is British and currently lives in Northampton, England.
His first novel, The Embedding, won the Prix Apollo in 1975. A prolific writer, he has also written the novels Miracle Visitors, God's World, The Jonah Kit and The Flies of Memory and many collections of short stories. Watson also worked on the storyline to the motion picture A.I.:Artificial Intelligence.
He has also written a series of novels tying in to the Warhammer 40,000 line of games, Draco, Chaos Child and Harlequin (collectively titled The Inquisition War).
Hello Ian and thank you for having accepted this interview. How would you
consider yourself as a writer? A surrealist? A sf author? Or do you just try
to ignore genres?
Probably I write SS, which is Science Surrealism. However, the letters SS are unpopular because of the Nazis, so I usually say that I write SF - especially so in England where "respectable" writers and critics are often snobbish and say stupid things about SF (although they haven't read any) at least once a day, which is irritating at first but then becomes funny. This is probably because the dominant culture in England is scientifically illiterate, which means people haven't much idea what a star is, for instance - they think is it someone self-important who can't act such as Tom Cruise. Though actually Tom Cruise belongs to a religion founded by an SF writer (who couldn't write), so maybe this is a bad example.
Science fiction today. Do you think it is moving towards some new ways of
expression? Will we discover new authors and maybe new ways to approach sf?
New authors have to discover themselves, really. In Anglo-America academics are constantly discovering new ways to approach SF -- this is quite an industry. At the moment quite a number of writers seem obsessed with the Singularity, the point (around about 2040, perhaps!) when things will be changing and mutating faster than human beings can follow or comprehend. Actually, the main question for the near future (apart from whether civilisation as we know it survives) is whether genuine Artificial Intelligence comes into existence -- or whether it is actually impossible. I have some good reasons why it is impossible, but maybe that's because I tend to prefer the less obvious interpretations of the future. Really interesting SF should look at what's less obvious or likely, from our point of view now, because the less likely is what usually happens, such as in the past the First World War or the rise of Hitler or of militant Islam or home computers. History sometimes gives a false sense of plausibility to what has happened.
Fantasy moves definitely more money than sf nowadays: look at The Lord of
the Rings, Harry Potter, and so on. Why does this happen?
Well, apart from the money, it's because fantasy consoles people. It suggests that everything can be made better somehow by wishing and magic, as opposed to science which has given us global warming, the Atom Bomb, environmental pollution, imminent extinction, holes in the ozone layer, and lots of other Scary Things, so it seems. A childish, rather than a mature, view of the world. American as a whole are very naïve, for instance, and lack any sense of irony. And unfortunately most people in America, which was supposed to be the spearhead of science and technology, now live by irrational delusionary belief systems. Of course, in other parts of the world lots of people have delusionary belief systems too, but America has more and bigger guns.
Young authors: what would you suggest them?
See if you can become older authors without succumbing to madness and despair, or on the other hand succumbing to vanity if by accident you're successful. In fact it's increasingly difficult to become an older author nowadays, because if you don't sell quite enough copies, no one will want your 3rd or 4th book, no matter how well you write. Publishing isn't controlled by publishers now, but by accountants. Perhaps you should quickly marry a prosperous accountant.
Italian authors: you are completing a very interesting experiment with
Roberto Quaglia. Can you tell me something about The Beloved of my Beloved?
An editor I sent one of the stories to said, "This has to be some sort of demented masterpiece, but you need a demented publisher." There will be about 10 demented stories, intended to destabilise the world and make some people laugh a lot, and make other people completely disgusted.
How has been for you to write a book together with Roberto Quaglia?
We've been compelled to drink Red Paradox wine in Timişoara(and I expect you to keep the cedilla under the "s" since it takes a lot of effort to put it there if you don't have a Romanian keyboard). We've been forced to drive long distances and stop in snowy Austrian valleys in order to transfer ourselves from one place where we can talk, to another place where we can talk. We have needed our Hungarian friend Peter to suddenly take long showers just when we thought we were about to leave somewhere, so that instead we could spend an hour in a kitchen together. Peter had to buy two-way radios so that Roberto and I could talk from one car to another about curvas on the roads (which means something different in Romanian). We have needed to visit Ceausescu's palace and a village in England which has a perfect model of itself within it, itself containing a model of the model, etc etc. We had to establish and present The Virgil Award for Hungarians who misdirect people, because Virgil guided Dante into Hell. We have needed to laugh and think demented thoughts and remember them (this is important) by taking notes - I'm quite good at taking notes because I've been Secretary of my local Village Hall for about 25 years.
Authors and the internet: is the WWW important for your work?
Cyberspace is very important for our book, especially when I'm in England and Roberto is in Moldova, which sometimes happens to him. Websites were important, so we could discover that bizarre ideas of ours were already reality, thus were not bizarre enough. I don't generally cruise the internet but if I suddenly need to know, for example, the size of a sperm whale's clitoris, I can find out much faster than by going to a library to find Moby Dick. I use the internet like a gull divebombing the sea to snatch a fish.
WWW also enabled me and my Spanish translator Luisa and Peter to set up www.ajeno.intelmedia.co.uk to celebrate the works of twisted genius of the previously unknown Colombian poet Miguel Ajeno.
What does it mean to you a science fiction that is close to reality?
Shall SF touch reality in any way, or surrealism has just to absorb it?"
A ridiculous cliché I often hear or see in news reports, when something
new & a bit weird is discovered or invented, is, "This is real; this isn't
science fiction!" So if something previously science-fictional happens
to get validated, or come true, science fiction gets no credit -- instead
it gets a slap in the face. This happens all the time, in Britain anyway.
And in an interview about his War of the Worlds movie, Spielberg said
something like, "The good thing about science fiction is you don't have to
be realistic - you can make up anything you want."
The other idiotic cliché is, "This isn't science fiction - it has real
characters." This is sometimes used by snobbish writers who borrow
material treated by SF, such as cloning, without having bothered to read
any SF, and who know they don't want their sacred work to be associated
with SF.
The power of these clichés is very strong and long-lasting. They are
worms in the brain. They cripple me from answering those questions.
