Best Selling Books by Ian Watson

A short children''s story about a family''s first visit to The Ickenham Miniature Railway. The children enjoy rides on steam trains and other locomotives. The railway is looked after by the Ickenham and District Society of Model Engineers. Ickenham is a village in the London Borough of Hillingdon.

Collection of the views and personal stories of over 50 Queenslanders involved in Reconciliation. Explores how the movement spread throughout Queensland, culminating in the 2000 Reconciliation Week Bridge Walk. Includes colour photos, notes and index. Watson won the 2001 Queensland Media Award for best coverage of multiculturalism and Foley was the Queensland Coordinator of the Australians for Reconciliation project from 1996-2000.

What is the connection between labour market deregulation and earnings inequality? Using Victoria as an example, this paper explores this question making use of a recent workplace survey. The results of this analysis show that a low wage sector emerged in Victoria during the late 1990s and that it was concentrated around ''Schedule 1A'' employees, those workers who failed to gain protection under Federal jurisdiction and had their wages and conditions determined by a combination of minimalist legislation and internal workplace regulation. A much greater dispersion of minimum pay rates was evident in Schedule 1A work-places compared to those under Federal coverage. More seriously, workers under Schedule 1A coverage were more concentrated in low wage workplaces with inferior employment benefits. The association between low minimum pay rates and Schedule 1A coverage was examined in a multivariate analysis and was found to persist after controlling for a range of other factors. These empirical findings suggest that labour market deregulation does indeed contribute to earnings inequality and that it also weakens the situation of those workers who are already structurally disadvantaged in the labour market.

Prior to what follows, our plucky quartet of Xiaolong, Zbeth, Yatta, and Ngela--who crew the time machine salvage ship Fibonacci which sets out from Cranberry, Oz, in 2776 Common Era aided by Homer the Artificial Intelligence to salvage time machines gone astray--became involved with tall aliens who left a dozen of their species in stasis cabinets in Antarctica 100K years ago until an asteroid melted Antarctica''s ice-cap in 2072 CE. Alas, Ngela perished inside dwarf planet Ceres from a giant spider bite but later turned up alive inside a stasis cabinet due to a ''Bolt mann Brain'' from the utterly far future, quite a conjuring trick. Now read on . . .