Most Popular Books by Ian WATSON

In The Gardens of Delight Ian Watson boldly lands a starship within the hallucinatory terrain of Hieronymus Bosch''s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a medieval masterpiece which enchants and horrifies all who see it, for the picture shows what looks to be a paradise of pleasure yet it also displays a terrible hell of torments. And so the ship''s psychologist, Sean Athlone, and two women companions explore the luxurious landscape of giant fruits and birds and strange towers and naked celebrating people, in quest of the godlike alien intelligence that has transformed a planet according to Bosch''s vision, populating it with the colonists from a previous starship.

Charles Spark is an expert on body language, a bestselling author and a consultant (or walking lie detector) much in demand with industry and government. So when the aliens arrive, who better to join the team that will attempt to understand them? But even though these insectoid aliens - the "Flies" - in their pyramid-ship speak both English and Russian, they seem unreadable. "We have come to your planet to remember it," they say and at first they seem indeed to be a bizarre group of intergalactic tourists. When human beings start to interfere, things begin disappearing. The Dome of St Peter''s in Rome is the first to go, followed by downtown Prague, old Mombasa, Münich, the heart of New Orleans. In an effort to understand what has happened, Spark, and a strange group of pilgrims, embark on a bizarre journey to Mars - where the city of Münich has reappeared in a canyon. And where time, and memory, have become manifest.

The river cuts right across the known world, from the impassable Far Precipices to the sea. The people on one bank are cut off from those on the other, for the black current has the power to stop them crossing. Only women can travel repeatedly up and down the river, but when Yaleen joins the boating guild and becomes a riverwoman, she is singled out to follow an even more extraordinary path...

Welcome to Black Cat Weekly #31. This time, the lineup includes pretty much everything fans look for in fantasy and science fiction—time travel, pyramids, space adventure, alternate history, war, monkeys, and even Nazi spies. Does it get much better than that? Not to forget our mystery readers, for them we have time travel, a private detective, police, international adventure, war, a solve-it-yourself puzzler, and even Nazis. (Did I mention there’s some overlap between the fantastic and the mysterious in this issue? Surprise! There is.) I leave you to sort it out among yourselves. In case you need some help, here’s the breakdown: Non-Fiction: “Speaking with Joe Haldeman,” conducted by Darrell Schweitzer [interview] Mysteries / Suspense / Adventure: “The Dutiful Rookie,” by James Holding [short story] “A Wee Bit Of Dough,” by Hal Charles [solve-it-yourself mystery] “The Case of the Truculent Avocado,” by Mark Thielman [Barb Goffman Presents short story] Paying the Price, by Nicholas Carter [novel] “Van Goghing, Goghing, Gone,” by Alan Orloff [Michael Bracken Presents short story] Science Fiction & Fantasy: “Van Goghing, Goghing, Gone,” by Alan Orloff [Michael Bracken Presents short story] “How High Your Gods Can Count,” by Tegan Moore [Cynthia Ward Presents short story] “How We Came Back From Mars,” by Ian Watson [Darrell Schweitzer Presents short story] “Death by Proxy,” by Malcolm Jameson[short story] Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore [novel]

In his fourth short-story collection, Watson again demonstrates the extraordinary scope of his imagination. The title story has ancient witchcraft meeting complacent modern suburbia in a tale of spine-chilling horror, while ''When the Timegate Failed'' casts an unexpected light in the dangers of space travel and man''s powers of self-delusion. Alien matters of a different kind crop up in ''Windows'', in which mysterious artefacts found on Mars prove to be something of a problem for their chic human owners. Evil Water is a highly inventive collection which is a delight to read.

The sudden appearance of angelic beings bearing a mystical space drive and a summons to ''''God''s World'''' launches an international crew of scientists on a voyage to the far limits of space. There they become embroiled in an alien war that will decide the fate of all creation . . .

He is a financial giant but the Sponsor wants more - he wants to become a super human, to be the modern-day Adam, father to a new generation of humans with heightened DNA. He had the viral injection to change himself, the will to do it, and now all he needs is an Eve to join him on his journey. He thinks he''s found the perfect match in Jean Sandra Norwich, a woman convinced she is trapped between the genes of her mother and daughter. The Sponsor offers her freedom - and so much more, the chance to be the mother of all Superbeings. But she will get more than she bargained for. CONVERTS is a masterpiece of science fiction and Ian Watson has superbly reworked Ovid''s METAMORPHOSES to create an extraordinary futuristic tale.

Ian Watson is one of the most prolific short story writers in contemporary science fiction, with a range and invention that others might envy. In this collection we move from a ghostly occurrence in Catalonia to a memorably hallucinatory and atmospheric tale of eggs and ectoplasm in pre-glasnost Russia. The Times said of Watson that his ''stories are springloaded with effect, compressed with a drama that, in others, might take a novel to eke out'', a judgement confirmed by he dozen stories collected here.

When a young British couple, who make jigsaw puzzles, are hired by an ageing Norwegian to take nude photos of themselves in a sculpture park in Oslo, they are drawn into a web of occult Nazi horror. Even more horrifying will be the fate of the whole world some years later if alien visitors achieve their secret aims. However, the aftermath of events in that Oslo park will provide Anna Sharman with a key to unlock those aims. Anna is a rebel within Britain''s intelligence service at a time when most of the world appeases the aliens because of the gifts they bring - and if she must lose her own body in order to discover the truth, she will do so.

This second collection of Watson''s short stories further demonstrates his seemingly inexhaustible imagination. In ''The Thousand Cuts'' the entire human race finds its consciousness blanked out for varying periods, but life seems somehow to have gone on in the missing days, and indeed, previously intractable problems have moved towards a solution. In ''Sunstroke'' a doctor blinded accidentally during the voyage to a seemingly benign new world becomes gradually aware of disturbing changes afflicting her sighted companions. These stories, and many others, confirm Watson''s place in the forefront of contemporary SF writers.

Where do the metal death gliders come from? To the glass-sailors of the five villages the slow birds that inched over the Earth at shoulder height, appearing and vanishing, were a mystery - until young Daniel climbed aboard one of the scarred Missiles and vowed to find out where it went Ian Watson''s third short story collection is his best yet: a brilliant array of original and imaginative inventions that plunge the reader into strangely familiar new worlds.

Ian Watson''s latest collection shows the same range and apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas that have characterized all his previous books. No other contemporary figure in SF is so prolific or inventive a writer of short stories. In the title story we immediately encounter a phantasmagoric vision of a society increasingly dependent on recycling its usable material; other brilliant inventions include a planet inhabited by lemur-like aliens who bafflingly produce marvellously finished stone carvings without apparently having the tools to do so (''The Moon and Michelangelo''); people fighting their way through the various levels of what appears to be a real-life version of a computer adventure game (''Jewels in an Angel''s Wing''); and a zoo in which are caged the extensions into our universe of four-dimensional hyberbeings (''Hyperzoo''). And that is only the beginning: there are fifteen stories in all, each one a state-of-the-art example of short science fiction at its finest.

Ian Watson is one of the finest writers of SF and fantasy stories, and Butterflies of Memory is his 10th collection, a selection of stories that are by turns serious and playful, and always wildly imaginative... In the title story, what if mobile phones were to become truly mobile, flying about like butterflies? ''An Appeal to Adolf'' tells of gay sailors on a Nazi battleship many kilometres long during a Second World War unfamiliar to us; ''Lover of Statues'' of an enigmatic alien visiting the only statue of Satan in the world, in Madrid - while in the bubbling stew of faiths which is Jerusalem a doorway opens to reveal capricious godlike beings. And just suppose that Jules Verne undertook an actual journey to the centre of the Earth. Closer to home, in a Midlands town, a man who seems to have suddenly popped into existence tries to discover who and what he is. ''Hijack Holiday'', written a year before 9/11, presciently if bizarrely anticipates events akin to those on that fateful day.

When Tom Ryan stops his car late at night on a dark road for a man dressed as a Roman centurion, his first thought is that he''s picked up one of those amateur re-enactors but the man, Marcus Appius Silvanus appears to speak only Latin. He insists the year is AD60 and that the British Queen is Boudicca - and that he and his men of the Fourteenth Gemina are in hot pursuit of her. Tom and his sister Mary shelter the Roman, but inadvertently attract the attention of an unscrupulous journalist. He''s not the only one interested in the Ryans: an IRA terrorist who was once Mary''s lover in Northern Ireland tracks her down to tell her the plane crash which killed her parents twenty years ago was caused by the British security services. Deep in the English countryside, those same servants of the state are busy exploiting the theories of a young prodigy to build ''Oracle'', a probe that can view the past - and, they hope, the future, so that threats to national security can be stifled before they occur.

Originally published in 1983. Song has always been a natural way to record everyday experiences – an expression of celebration, commiseration, complaint and protest. This innovative book is a study of popular and working-class song combining several approaches to the subject. It is a history of working-class song in Britain which concentrates not simply on the songs and the singers but attempts to locate such song in its cultural context and apply principles of literary criticism to this essentially oral medium. It triggered controversy: some critics castigated its Marxist approach, others enthused that ‘such unabashed partisanship amply reveals the outstanding characteristic of Watson''s book’. The author discusses the way in which the popular song, from Victorian times onwards, has been forced by the entertainment industry out of its roots in popular culture, to become a blander form of art with minimal critical potential. The book ends by considering the possibilities for a continued flourishing of a genuine popular song culture in an electronic age. It has become a standard title in bibliographies and curricula. Much has changed since 1983, not least in music; but this then innovative book still has a lot to say about popular song in its social and historical context.

Fictional comedy drama set in the English holiday town of Blackpool in the off season. A very funny, fast-paced plot that contains sex, drugs, violence, gangsters and plenty of laughs as a teenage boy gets into a world of grief and very dangerous people when all he wanted was to impress the girl of his dreams.

An ancient Power awakes. A modern evil mushrooms into apocalypse. Cocooned in a nightmare world, the village of Melfort waits, as The Power feeds on the death and destruction, fuelling its gross appetite. And the dead rise up.