"A dialect of history and transcendence." This is how British author Ian Watson has described his own work, a writing style that combines hard science with socio-political elements in the examination of "the relationship between reality and consciousness."*
Born in North Shields, Northumberland, England, in 1943, Watson attended Oxford where he earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1963, a bachelor of literature in 1965, and a master's in 1966. Following the completion of his studies, he began a series of teaching stints that took him to the far reaches of the globe. His first teaching position was at University College, Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. This was followed by three different positions at schools here in my neck of the woods: Tokyo University, Keio University, and the Japan Women's University.
His tour of duty in Japan ended in 1970, after which he returned to his native England where he took a position at the Birmingham Polytechnic Art and Design Center. Since 1976 he has been a full-time freelance writer and has been a contributor to, and features editor of, the journal Foundation.
Like myself, Watson began writing science fiction while he was in Japan. He has said that he did so as a sort of "survival mechanism" that helped him cope with the conflicts between the social signals coming from all around him and the English literature that he was teaching.* For me it is, in part, a way of coping with the conflicts between those same social signals and the American culture in which I grew up. (In another semi-connection, I'm from Birmingham, Alabama, while Watson worked in Birmingham, England. Like I said, it's a semi-connection.)
Returning to Watson, it is this time spent in Japan that led him to write one of his earliest books, Japan: A Cat's Eye View, in 1969. This coverage
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