‘Thy Blood Like Milk’ reads like a savage Zelazny, weaving cruel mythology and post-holocaust tribalism into an account of an irradiated future that is part social satire. The title story alone is too clever for its own good, a thought-experiment that loses its way into mystical abstraction. This book demonstrates his range and power. His earliest anthologised story, the nightmarish ‘Thy Blood Like Milk’, dates from 1974 and can be found in The Very Slow Time Machine (1979), his first short-story collection. Much of this stuff he obviously deems of little worth. In the early ‘70’s Watson began to accelerate. ‘The Sex Machine’ (1970) was chased by ‘The Tarot Pack Megadeath’ (1970) in the penultimate issue of the magazine. Various other short pieces followed ‘Roof Garden’ into New Worlds.
Apart from its decorative worth, it has surely the most evocative debut title in SF history.Īfter that, things become a little complicated. Only appearing in the magazine, it is ripe for collection. His first short-story, ‘Roof Garden Under Saturn’ (1969), was published in New Worlds at its most glorious period. Combined with his predilection for female main characters, such rampant internationalism has kept his earliest work fresh.
These locations often figure in his stories. Pretentious it is not, and rarely languid or indolent.Įducated in Balliol, earning his English degree in 1963, he left the country to teach in Tanzania and Japan. His work is clean, cunningly wrought but accessible. But he is no affected decadent, musty as a Mirbeau, cluttering up his writing with ultra-violet prose. Monstrous orchids often put out creepers into his fiction. Watson has a genuine love for exotic plants. One thing only can be stated simply: his imagination has always been good, but his prose has improved steadily.īorn in North Shields in 1943, his first published pieces were for gardening journals at age 13. There are the horror tales, deadpan in execution the metaphysical adventures, richly scented with Tantric symbolism the forest of pure ideas, a resource rarely logged in genre fiction. There are, however, certain categories into which sections of his oeuvre can be parcelled, if not neatly then at least conveniently. So prolific is Watson’s output that a detailed overview of his work is almost impossible in a single article. He is the true professional, a writer for whom quantity and quality are not incompatible terms. But he is younger than his peers, and possessed of an enormous energy that makes them seem idle by comparison. Watson is one of those lucky surfers who rode the ’60s New Wave without being dashed on the rocks. There is no cleverer short-story writer working in SF today, and precious few novelists. Ian Watson is our very own Borges, the man who can nurture bizarre ideas and train them to climb all over the genre’s walls and ceiling. Search Roof-Gardening Under Saturn The Work of Ian Watson Rhys Hughes
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