The Book Of Ian Watson Read online

  THE BOOK OF IAN WATSON

  Ian Watson

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Preface

  AFRICAN

  The Flags of Africa

  JAPANESE

  Shrines and Ratholes (part 1)

  Imaginary Cricket

  Roof Garden Under Saturn

  LINGUISTIC

  Towards an Alien Linguistics

  The False Braille Catalogue

  The Love Song of Johnny Alienson

  SCIENCE-FICTIONAL

  The Crudities of Science Fiction

  The Big Buy

  Who Can Believe in the Hero(ine)?

  Showdown on Showdown

  INEXPLICABLE

  UFOs, Science, and the Inexplicable

  Horrorscope

  Some Sufist Insights into the Nature of Inexplicable Events

  Dome of Whispers

  METAPHORICAL

  Down the Mines

  A Cage for Death

  POLITICAL

  Up the Pole

  Shrines and Ratholes (part II)

  The President’s Not for Turning

  HYPOTHETICAL

  Hype Hype Hoorah!

  The Real Winston

  April in Paris

  HORTICULTURAL

  Some Cultural Notes and Pest Control

  The Culling

  IMMORTAL

  The Pharaoh and the Mademoiselle

  Website

  Also by Ian Watson

  Acknowledgments

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  Preface

  Welcome to The Book of Ian Watson, a kind of autobiography woven of fiction and non-fiction.

  Here are some of the main strands of my life as a writer and person: strands African, strands Japanese; strands science-fictional, strands political. And linguistic. And satirical. And a few other things, besides.

  Here we take a journey down into the mine of the imagination. Here we chase flying saucers and fail to catch them, but we arrive on some alien worlds, nonetheless. Meanwhile, back home, the Earth too becomes quite strange at times. Here we try to trap death; and meet an Egyptian Pharaoh who believes he has triumphed, but is undone by a kiss. Here we discover the real reason why Winston Smith worked so hard in the Ministry of Truth rewriting newspapers; and find an American President going through a change of life. Here we encounter Sufis and whales, demon librarians and gamblers. We visit a Shinto shrine and dine at an Irish restaurant in Paris.

  I have tied these assorted strands together in what I hope you’ll find to be a continuous, invigorating, entertaining pattern—but we always hope that about books, don’t we?

  Here is my book. Me. And your book too.

  Welcome. Soyez le bienvenu. Irassyaimase.

  AFRICAN

  “Always something new out of Africa,” said the Roman, Pliny. I lived in East Africa for two years. And what was new in fiction? The French nouveau roman. How Alain Robbe-Grillet, author of La Jalousie, would have loved to read the reports in The Standard, published in Dar es Salaam, of a peculiar misconceived murder trial up-country where fact and fiction were weirdly intermingled …

  The Flags of Africa

  Under the hurricane lamp the policeman was turning the teacher’s effects over. The crowd had unfastened the teacher’s shirt and trousers greedily, ready hands had drawn them off, later they dressed him in a dirty white gown. The policeman removed the keys from the teacher’s pocket and went straightway to search his house. What did he hope to find there?

  Holding the hurricane lamp up high the African watched his prisoner through the bars of the door. The American was still sitting in much the same position with his back against the wall and his eyes half-shut and his hands clasped in his lap.

  ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘It feels so cold in here.’

  ‘It’s a hot night, you’re lucky.’

  The hurricane lamp belonged on the table between the portrait of Julius K. Nyerere and the multicolour chart THE FLAGS OF AFRICA.

  THE FLAGS OF AFRICA was the most important thing in the room.

  What was Mauritania’s flag?

  YELLOW CRESCENT & YELLOW STAR on GREEN. Senegal?

  HORIZONTALS: GREEN,

  YELLOW,

  &RED

  with a GREEN STAR in the CENTRE of the YELLOW HORIZONTAL.

  Ivory Coast?

  VERTICALS: ORANGE, WHITE, & GREEN. Upper Volta?

  HORIZONTALS: BLACK,

  WHITE,

  &RED.

  Congo (Kinshasa)?

  A BAND OF RED lined with ORANGE BANDS

  cutting DIAGONALLY across a BLUE BACKGROUND

  from BOTTOM LEFT to TOP RIGHT

  with an ORANGE STAR in the TOP LEFT CORNER.

  ‘To develop powers of observation and memory,’ wrote Assistant Inspector De Souza in the Tanzania Police Journal, ‘it is essential to set yourself tests more stringent than Rudyard Kipling ever devised for Kim. …

  An act of pure cognition in an arbitrary medium.

  Why shouldn’t Ivory Coast be BLACK and WHITE and RED, and Upper Volta ORANGE and WHITE and GREEN?

  Lose a flag and you lose it in the rainbow, in the visible spectrum …

  Togo?

  HORIZONTALS: GREEN,

  YELLOW,

  GREEN,

  YELLOW,

  GREEN

  with a LARGE RED SQUARE containing a WHITE STAR in the TOP LEFT extending down as far as the BASE of the CENTRE (GREEN) HORIZONTAL.

  The two pictures on the teacher’s walls were a chaos of colours with no design, no horizontals, verticals, diagonals or stars. Maybe a madman painted them. One was full of blots of dull greens and browns with a single splash of orange at the top and it was like a flag in that respect, with its orange disc, but it had none of the integrity of a flag. It was a flag reflected in a rainy puddle. The other was a seasick swirl of greens and yellows and blues. It reminded him a little of the Central African Republic, though the colours were much more confused.

  Affec
tionately the policeman spread the exercise books out on the table in the light of the hurricane lamp.

  Niger?

  HORIZONTALS: GREEN,

  WHITE,

  & ORANGE

  with an ORANGE DISC in the very CENTRE.

  Picking up the exercise books one by one, the policeman leafed through them, noting that the writing looked regular, thoughtful and neat, in some parts, but in other parts it looked frantic and misshapen as if the words had been tossed down on to the page where they broke and splashed and hung askew. A man’s handwriting was like a man’s voice. A man’s friends recognized the same voice whether he whispered, or sang out loud.

  Two of the exercise books had lost their covers, two came from a stationery company in Chicago, the remaining three carried the name of the local Indian printing works. So he put them in this order provisionally, first the two that had lost their covers, then the two from Chicago, last the three from the Indian printers.

  The difference between Sudan and Gabon?

  Sudan had

  HORIZONTALS: BLUE,

  YELLOW

  & GREEN.

  Gabon had

  HORIZONTALS: GREEN,

  YELLOW,

  & BLUE.

  What had Rwanda got that Guinea hadn’t got?

  Rwanda and Guinea both had

  VERTICALS: RED, YELLOW, & GREEN. But Rwanda also had

  a BIG BLACK LETTER R’ in the CENTRE. What was the difference between Senegal and Mali? Senegal and Mali both had

  VERTICALS: GREEN, YELLOW, & RED. But Senegal had

  a GREEN STAR in the CENTRE. While Mali had

  a BLACK MATCHSTICK MAN.

  As he sat there, winged beetles dashed themselves through the bars on the windows at the roaring lamp, pattering down on to the exercise books, their wings crisped by the pillar of heat rising from the lamp chimney, their legs kicking in the air. Frantically they rotated on their polished shells and for long moments lay still in exhaustion. His sense of the flaglike neatness of the evidence was offended by the brittle caramel bodies littering it.

  How many countries had stars?

  Tunisia Morocco Algeria Mauritania Senegal Liberia Congo (Kinshasa) Cameroun Togo United-Arab-Republic Central-African-Republic Ghana Libya Somalia.

  These stars were WHITE and BLACK and GREEN and YELLOW and RED, like the stars in the night sky. Tunisia and Algeria boasted of the RED STAR. Somalia Libya Liberia and Togo, strangely for African nations, bore WHITE STARS.

  The policeman opened a packet of Ten Cent cigarettes, lit one from the lamp chimney, sucked smoke in. Abruptly he brushed the books clean of beetles with a sweep of his hand.

  Over the bush, beyond the hills where the crime had taken place, a full yellow moon was rising. For a while longer he watched a line of fire creeping down one of the hillsides. He expelled smoke from his lungs in satisfaction into the night where the land also smoked in the moonlight. …

  Inside the cell: anaesthesia, of the flesh against the cold cement; of the feelings, towards a dead woman who happened to have been his wife. …

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ the teacher was shouting. ‘My wife is lying there right now. She’s hurt. She thinks I’m bringing help. Every second you delay me you’re hurting her. What do you think happened? You don’t think I … no that’s crazy. You must be crazy. You know me, I’m the teacher, I teach your sons and daughters. You don’t seriously think I … but I can see you do. You mustn’t. That’s wrong, awful wrong. You understand what I’m saying? Listen I wasn’t running away. Why should I do that! I was cycling for help. I hadn’t time to stop when you shouted. She may be dying in pain and fear all alone while we stand here arguing. You know I can’t run away even if I wanted to. Won’t you give me an answer? Haven’t you got an answer? Look at me, you all know who I am, I’m your teacher. Would the Government have put me in charge of your sons and daughters if there was the slightest shade of suspicion, any doubt at all? Have your children ever said anything was wrong? Don’t be afraid to say. You must speak out or hand me back my bicycle.’

  ‘We all saw him running away, racing off on his bicycle, bumping along the road like a drunk or madman. He fought like a madman too, see how my shirt’s torn. He didn’t say a word to us. He just fought. When we had him helpless, then he started to plead. But before that not a word of explanation!’

  ‘He was up there on the very top of the hill on that rock platform above the boulders. It was like a play that the mission children put on. She was dressed like one of the saints in white, he was the Devil tempting her. He stretched out his hand and showed her the whole world. A child could have understood. She fell as if she expected there would be soft pillows below not stones. …

  ‘He ran down the hillside with great leaps like an animal. I’m astonished he didn’t break his ankle. Leap, leap, leap, from one boulder to the next. Like the most agile antelope. I wouldn’t have dared those leaps in my young days. When he reached the bottom she was trying to stand up, hanging on by one of the boulders. He threw her down again and knelt astride her. He strangled her. I saw his two hands pressing her down while she struggled, then knotted round the neck. That’s when he picked up his bicycle, after he strangled her.’

  ‘I was hoeing my fields when I saw her falling. She fell over and over like a great white bird.’

  ‘But he didn’t strangle her. They were struggling and he picked up a small white stone and struck her on the side of the head with it over and over again till she lost her senses, and each time he took his hand away the stone was redder with blood than before. The stone was white like his hand then slowly it turned red.’

  The policeman listened to them politely, sitting on the saddle of his bicycle, resting one foot on the ground for support.

  When the sun touched the horizon, a bulging orange yolk, he had lowered the flag outside the police station, lamenting how sun-bleached and weather-stained it was. He locked the flag away in his cupboard and when he came outside again, the orange yolk had sunk without splitting, leaving a white wispy cloud behind like an albuminous cord still attached to it.

  Up on the hilltop, on that rocky platform, the sun was still engaged in setting, was only now bulging out like the yolk that would flood the world.

  Congo (Kinshasa)?

  A BAND OF RED lined with ORANGE BANDS

  cutting DIAGONALLY across a BLUE BACKGROUND

  from BOTTOM LEFT to TOP RIGHT

  with an ORANGE STAR in the top LEFT CORNER.

  Quite natural that the farmer in his field, the witch skulking beneath a baobab tree, and the young catechist walking along the road reported seeing different events. How many citizens could say for sure whether the green triangle or the blue triangle was next to the flagstaff, on the flag he had just taken down? Yet they stood up for it and cheered it and saluted it.

  He listened patiently with one foot resting on the ground. He didn’t get off his bicycle. Even when the American teacher shouted and struggled—the crowd kept a tight hold on him—he stayed seated. Important not to become personally involved in a sweaty struggle, important to control the situation in the way a traffic policeman controls cars, and that wasn’t by putting his shoulder to them and shoving.

  Gabon?

  HORIZONTALS: GREEN,

  YELLOW,

  & BLUE.

  To what extent could he trust the evidence of eyes that would swear the black diagonal (bordered with yellow) on their own national flag ran from top left to bottom right? (The shame of seeing the flag flown upside-down outside the Regional Commissioner’s Headquarters!) Lawyers tested the truthfulness of the witness by word of mouth, without ever testing his eyes. They should use THE FLAGS OF AFRICA:

  an optical chart for illiterates.

  ‘We were bringing him to you to arrest him.’

  ‘He was fleeing as if a devil …’

  ‘But we know how to deal with devils, don’t we old woman! We catch them and lock them up!’ The catechist spoke with v
enom.

  The witch, wrapped up in her black buibui, stared through him. Her hands and feet looked like a model of their own bare veins and tendons. But if her arms and legs seemed skeletal in proportion to the voluminous buibui, she was balancing a heavy branch on her head.

  Personally he didn’t believe in spirits infesting the air. A flag was the air made visible and there was nothing sinister in it, only stars and bands of colour, birds and a black sun.

  But was it the same air as the witch breathed through her beak?

  From the hilltop, the witch wasn’t visible, standing motionless in the shade of an elephantine baobab with a branch on her head. The tree towered over her with its crown of stiff white arms, a petrified squid. One of its fallen pods lay at her feet like a baby’s bald head with a few downy hairs. Fat black ants ran into a crack to fetch the sherbet clinging round the seeds.

  A powder-blue and grey bird landed in the grit a few feet from her and rushed to right and left snatching up ants, each rush leading it closer to her.

  She saw the woman in white appear behind the man on the hilltop. The man pointed at something far away with a casual gesture, and the woman stepped forward to see it. As she stepped forward …

  The bird raced along another tangent, and entered the shade cast by the branch on her head. The witch suddenly spat into the sand just in front of the bird, startling it into the air …

  The man stumbled towards the rock’s edge and regained his balance only by stepping behind the woman, hiding her from the witch’s gaze for a moment. Nevertheless the white dress was already billowing up around white kicking legs …