Ian Watson, author of 30 novels and nearly 200 stories, possesses a dazzling wit, a lateral-thinking mind, and a willingness to try a variety of genres: sf, fantasy, horror, space opera, poetry, filmscripts. He achieved some recent fame as a scriptwriter (under Stanley Kubrick) for Steven Spielberg's AI. In his better known sf novels such as The Embedding and Miracle Visitors, he delved into the nature of consciousness and reality, as well as in The Jonah Kit, which won several awards. J. G. Ballard characterized Watson's work as "superb descriptive writing within a ceaseless flow of ideas." His latest collection is The Great Escape (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002), and three volumes of his best short stories will appear next year from Cosmos Books.
