Ian Watson, Deathhunter (1981)

Deathhunter (1981) is a curious, oddly memorable short novel. The story concerns the titular protagonist, Jim Todhunter. As the book opens he is travelling to Egremont (somewhere in a near-future North America) to take up a new position in a House of Death. We are in a quasi-utopian post-nuclear war world where ‘death’ has been de-pathologised. Our unheathly obsession with death and the religious fictions of ‘afterlife’ had brought the world to the brink of disaster. ‘We were going to destroy this whole fair world of ours and al the people in it because we couldn’t come to terms with death. Death was something that never happened to us, but only to the other fellow. We expelled the dead from our lives. We made them into strangers, who had nothing to do with us’ [12]. This led to a brief nuclear exchange that seems to have destroyed China, and a postbellum re-arrangement of social and thanatological priorities. Now death is an accepted part of the community, each town being built around the House of Death where, after a useful life, people are gentle and openly euthanized. Jim wanders round Egremont, and listens to the poet laureate Norman Harper blithely face his own death: speeches by the mayor in front of an admiring crowd, Harper himself reading his own poems.

It’s a nice touch that these poems are super-banal; and Watson’s feel for the fundamentally underpowered Ikea-lite trappings of his utopia is itself nicely understated—actual utopia, we all know deep down, would be a profoundly beige and humdrum place. But the peaceful ceremony is shattered when a terminally ill and deranged individual called Weinberger rushes the podium and shoots Harper dead with a pistol. Shock! Why did he do it?

Todhunter is given Weinberger as a ‘patient’, with the brief of encouraging him to accept his inevitable and now (after this almost unprecedented capital crime) imminent euthanisation. But Weinberger turns the tables on Todhunter, revealing that he used himself to work in a House of Death, and that he had noticed a ‘pheromone of death’ on the nearly dead that in turn attracted a sort of half-visible red giant moth-like creature. Death itself, this beast, come to steal away the souls. The only way to evade this alarming soul predator is to die suddenly, unexpectedly—hence Weinberger’s assassination of Harper. This obviously improbable circumstance takes root in Todhunter’s imagination until he becomes persuaded, and with Weinberger builds a sort of large mirrored box-cum-Faraday-cage. The two simulate death and emit the pheromone and lo! death flutters in.

Something suddenly flickered … into existence. A red thing—except that it was not really ‘red’—appeared abruptly, perching upon Weinberger’s chest. It was a bat, or giant moth … it flickered: it seemed to dance in and out of existence. It had big glassy eyes—if they were eyes—as red as the rest of its body. And a cruel little beak. It wore sharp hooks on its veil-like wings—if they were wings—like the spurs of a fighting cock [62; ellipses in original]

Weinberger grabs this in his fist and holds on: all afternoon, through the night and into the next day, despite it being agony (and despite the creature being invisible outside the cage). When he finally relinquishes the thing his cancer has miraculous vanished from his body.

The remainder of the novel sees Todhunter, under increasing pressure from his fellow House of Death employees to give up this dangerous and unhealthy obsession with an hallucinatory afterlife, joining Weinberger in his pursuit of death. The two of them are forced to flee into the forests, where they chase death down a second time, following it into a weird surreality, past a crystal fog and into a no-space structured as corridors and doors and infinite possible realities by (we assume) their own consciousnesses. There’s a whole flock, or swarm, of the death-moth-bats—what, incidentally, is the collective noun for a mass of death-moth-bats? Is it like ravens? After passing through a succession of odd realms, including one containing the otherwise entirely unexplained naked tentacle-chest woman pictured in the front cover art above, they meet a man-sized insectile ‘angel’, or perhaps devil. According to this creature the death-moth-bats are not preying on dying souls, but are rather sent to guide them to the realm of infinite possible realities. Those who die suddenly either stay on the Earth as ghosts, or else become trapped in the (malign and expanding) crystal fog.

Now the novel has a twist-ending, and to that end I must issue a spoiler warning. I wasn’t very impressed by the twist, actually; officials from the House of Death catch up with Todhunter and Weinberger in the wilderness and, far from taking them into custody, kill them both. Todhunter passes through the crystal fog to emerge in a reality that exactly replicates the circumstances of the opening of the novel. He is at the ceremony marking the euthanizing of Harper, aware that at any moment Weinberger will come running up with his pistol. Then the last chapter effects a shift of POV. Now we are in an institute in Montenegro (of which ‘Egremont’ is a near anagram) in ‘our’ world; Todhunter is a criminal—a defrocked priest who abused and later murdered children—who is being treated for his psychosis in an experimental ‘psychoscope’; the House of Death and its whole world being a sort of matrix-y hallucination within the machine. The characters in the novel are all officers working for the institute; but Weinberger is resisting his treatment. The twist-on-the-twist is when one of his (we are assured, purely notional) death-bat-moth creatures breaks out of the imaginary reality of the psychoscope and flutters off into our world.

Twists are tricky things. This Shutter Island-style reveal (of course, avant le lettre) is liable to leave the reader a little nonplussed: to leave her wondering a little sourly what exactly is the status of the intriguing gnarly and interestingly literal-minded speculation on death that has gone before. Still: there is, I think, a kind of aesthetic redemption implicit in the larger project here. The game here is not one a conjurer’s one of false-reveal followed by false-reveal through to a final flourish with a true reveal. The game is a more intricately embedded one.

Step back a moment. What is the nature of this fictional afterlife? Doors, doors, doors

Cautiously Jim opened the doors a crack, then pulled them wide. Now there was a no bluebell wood outside. In its place was a moated castle set in a clearing in an oak wood. Steep jagged mountains of ice or glass rose beyond the wood, flashing in the sunshine. A dinosaur-like dragon capered … A knight rode out of the castle over the drawbridge ...

“Fairyland!” exclaimed Weinberger. “All the facets of Fairyland!”

He thrust the doors shut before they could witness the outcome of the dragon-tilt and pulled them wide once more.

A great cavern with an underground river running through it. Bones littered the stone floor. A wicker cage penned a weeping, hand-wringing maiden. A giant, with nail-studded club over one shoulder, grabbed for them. Its fist slammed into the doors as both men through their weight against them. They forced the twin doors shut against increasing pressure, till they clicked home. [132-33]

That it’s not just ‘fairyland’ is made plain in the next few afterlives glimpsed: ‘a white rabbit wearing a frock coat ran past, feverishly consulting a pocket watch’ (that TOS Star Trek episode has a lot to answer for); ‘again: a bilious, lime-green, goggle-eyed toad rowed lazily along a winding river under the feathery drip of willow trees. The toad sported a straw boater with a candy-striped hatband, a loud checkered jacket and a mustard waistcoat.’ You get the point. But the specificity is self-reflexive:

Here the doors opened on some future city, or some city on another world. The two men stood high on a railed tower, looking down. Gossamer bridges spanned rose-red canyons. Craft flew through the air, flapping metal wings like birds. The sun in the sky was hugely swollen, a dying bonfire red. When they reopened this same door a moment later, bloated glassy spiders the size of houses floated through a violet sky above a tawny desert, their dangling webs snaring angular white birds.

“They’re genre doors, that’s what,” cried Weinberger. “Sets of fictions. Imaginings. Free creations. Not hells or purgatories, but inventions.’ [133]

This is the crux. The beige-utopia in which people submit smilingly to community-sanctioned euthanasia is a genre creation. Embedded within it is a secondary genre creation, a world in which death is an actual being—not a bleached-white skeleton man in black cloak, but a weird bat-moth thing—that leads ‘consciousness’ into an afterlife (like the Douglas Trumbull 1983 SF movie Brainstorm, which this novel anticipates)* amenable to scientific enquiry. That afterlife is revealed to be: genre itself, the myriad possibilities not of ‘fiction’ as such but specifically of fantastika. This is what provides the, as it were, aesthetic geometry of the novel with its rationale: a genre text that squirrels its imaginings down through layers of genre to reveal this human universal—death—as not the end but on the contrary the very ground of possibility of genre itself, the setting in which the novel in which this topography is revealed is situated. The final twist, with the bat-moth fluttering away into ‘our’ world, is less a Tales-of-the-Unexpected style reversal, and more a reaffirmation or the interpenetration of this complexly self-embedded topography.
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*Actually, looking into it, I discover Trumbull was working on the movie in 1981; Natalie Wood's death delayed the release until 1983. So: no lines of influence, just a slightly uncanny coincidence of fascinations.

Minding the Gap

Alternate titles for this post included: 'The World According To Gap'; 'The Gap Band' and 'Donaldson Wheers Yer Troosers?' That last word should probably have a hyphen between the 'oo' and the 's'. Also, as per the line from p.47 of This Day All Gods Die, quoted below: 'So Adam: what did you think of CMOS?'

So, yes, I finally got around to reading these novels. Can't remember why I didn't read them when they first came out, Mind you, I can't remember why I thought it would be a good idea to read them now, either. Maybe my memory is starting to go.

The first vol, The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story (1991), is the shortest of the five. A troll-ugly space pirate (Angus Thermopyle) turns up in a space station bar with an exceptionally beautiful young woman called Morn Hyland. She clearly hates him, but she does what he tells her. The regulars believe Angus has a sort of mind-control implant in Morn that compels her to do whatever he dials into the control; and everyone assumes moreover that he spends most of the time, in the privacy of his ship, dialling in all manner of kinky degrading sex acts. But another space pirate happens to be in the bar: the handsome, dashing Nick Succorso. He sees Morn. Morn sees him. Suddenly Angus has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit (though there are thousands of worse crimes he has committed), and before we even get to the end of chapter 1 Morn and Succorso have run off together

This, though, is not ‘the real story’. We are assured the ‘real story’ is quite other, and the rest of the novel is given over to retelling it in detail. Confusingly, it turns out to be exactly what everybody assumed: Thermopyle had rescued Morn from her parents’ space ship, which she herself sabotaged (she suffers from the ‘gap sickness’ that afflicts 1% of space travellers: passing through hyperspace drives her temporarily insane). Angus had then fitted her with a brain control device, and using this he rapes her every which way for chapter after chapter after chapter—ghastly, monotonous reading, as gruelling as it is boring. The only twist, as it were, is that Succorso turns out not to be the dashing hero figure, but another violent misogynist interested only in hurting and raping our heroine. The whole thing is brutish, and the flimsiness of its central textual thread makes the brutishness somehow worse, like a version of ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ performed by Laibach whilst ripping the heads off kittens.

It may be that Donaldson thinks that the ‘real’ story is the psychological one; that like Nabokov’s Lolita he is delineating a monster only to humanise him, and sketching a victim only to complexify her. But Donaldson is no Nabokov. It's a genuinely queasy book. It posits a beautiful young woman who commits an unspeakable crime (Morn's 'Gap sickness' prompted her to murder her whole family, you see) and is therefore set up as punishment-worthy. Then it rigs this character with an implant that renders her perfectly complaisant, however much she hates what she is doing. It's as if it is going out of its way to say to one sector of its reading public: hey, you, ugly young geek guy who can't get laid. Imagine what you could do with this set-up! It's like an SF version of John Norman's Gor (and, really, can you think of anything SF needs less than one of those?)  What's the word? Well everybody's heard about the word, and ugh! is the word. It's hardly possible to iterate that word often enough, or with enough force, here.

The second instalment The Gap into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (1991) is four times as long, and contains quite a lot of business, although by no means does it contain 650-pages worth of substance. The big event here is that Morn discovers she is pregnant, following Angus’s multiple rapes. She tells Nick the baby is his, and a complicated tangle of plotting takes them to the alien race called the Amnion. This is notionally to use their technology to enable Morn to give birth to an adult, and so nip past all the tedious decades of growing-up otherwise needful to introduce Angus and Morn’s son into the story. There’s the question of whether Nasty Nick will sell a human (Morn, or Morn’s son) to the Amnion, which outcome is repeatedly claimed to be The Worst Thing Imaginable.

Donaldson doesn’t write characters; he writes marionettes (divided into: male, wicked, ugly; male, wicked, handsome; female beautiful victim; female beautiful deadly; other). The flatness of this characterisation means that he has to force his puppet-players into more and more intensely exaggerated reactions, ever more extreme shrieking and suffering and yelling. Emotion is always turned up to ten, or else turned off entirely. It results in a weirdly jerky, stop-start description of subjectivity which prompts D. to more and more hyperbolically extreme adjectival and adverbial description. This very quickly putters into diminishing returns. Here’s Nick Succorso, pirate, rapist etc.; thwarted and trapped, described over the course of a couple of pages of A Dark And Hungry God Arises (1993):

Fear and rage knotted his muscles, twisted his throat. An instinct for survival stretched as thin as thread was all that kept him from hurling himself at her throat … His muscles were so tight with strain that he could hardly breathe. [90-1]

He no longer needed outrage. He was calm now, almost clinical himself. His grin showed how calm he was. [93]

He felt too buoyant to sit down. … nonchalantly, Nick nodded cheerfully. [97]

All at once Nick started laughing. He had to laugh to prevent himself from screaming. … In another minute he was going to kill the command second with his bare fists. … Nick opened his throat to roar. [100]

He didn’t need to scream. Or kill Mikka. Suddenly calm again, as casual as ever, he asked Scorz, “who is it this time?” A sigh of relief or trepidation seemed to spread away from him around the bridge. … Involuntarily Nick recoiled as if he had been hit. His calm was gone in an instant; forgotten. [100]

There’s no way any crew would follow so cyclotropic a captain, but that’s hardy the point. Donaldson isn’t portraying a group dynamic that comes even close to verisimilitude; he’s straining every pip for INTENSITY and PASSION and EXCITEMENT and flapping the toggle on the back of his androidal characters between ‘suave’ and ‘rage-screamy’ with increasing desperation as those qualities stubbornly refuse to come alive in his writing. His characters aren’t ‘characters’ in the conventional sense: they’re vessels into which one or other extreme emotion can be decanted as needed.

The hectic hyper-vehemence infects the writing too, and not with any good effect. Immediately after the last-quoted passage Nick understands something, which mental process D. describes according to the following improbable simile: ‘a laser of inspiration shot along the synapses of Nick’s brain; his nerves were ablaze with coherent light’ [100]. Donaldson may think he’s achieving a kind of operatic heightened intensity, or perhaps even something simpler—maybe he’s going for the externalised bright-colour bang!-bang!-bang! of comics.

He doesn’t create either vibe, though. The galaxy-spanning setting of the novel is unable to prevent it feeling intensely and unpleasantly claustrophobic: we seem forever trapped in poky spaceships with a screaming, gurning, punching, raping cast of half a dozen; or else in interminable committee meetings of the UMCP, where the director and effective Galactic tyrant Holt Fasner interminably schemes his terrible schemes. The effect is more like Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

It's not that the effect lacks creepiness; it's that it skews ludicrous, not tragic-intense. And it gets more pronounced as the series goes on: the books get longer, more claustrophobic, more tedious and prolix, more unpleasant. And the style gets worse. Indeed, by the time we get to the last two books, there's little to do except to register the unique Donaldsonian style. Here, from 1994's Chaos and Order:

[109] Wheeling like a blow, he raged.

[130] Angus’ heart clenched in a grimace which didn’t show on his face.

[146] For reasons she couldn’t name, premonitions of disaster burned in her palms.

[165] Her shoulders hunched into a clench of disgust, which she deflected into a shrug.

[170] His hands were steady as stones as he toggled his intercom.

[174] If other means failed he probably had a dozen strategically placed buggers he could rely on.

[176] Above his open mouth, his eyes blinked like cries.

[177] His aura yowled of furies that didn’t show on his face.

[205] The smears on his lenses refracted his blue gaze into streams of hope and apprehension.

[216] The face that greeted him in his mirror was as wrinkled and used as a sheet of crumpled tissue.

[233] Perspiration turned to ice on his forehead and ran down the sides of his jaw.

[237] Matter is ‘frozen’ energy … Conversely energy may be understood as ‘liquid’ matter.

[240] She discovered that most of her aches were gone, and her ears no longer registered everything against a background of pain. Nevertheless her anger remained.

[251] She had to clench her teeth and grip her gun hard to prevent herself from flinging her stew across the galley.

[252] Under his fat, his features hardened.

[264] His grin was so abhorrent that Angus howled to himself; but he made no sound.

[265] Davies looked like his chest was congested with shouts.

[266] Angus looked straight at Nick, but with his peripheral vision he studied his readouts.

[280] A clutch of loss lifted his shoulders like a shrug.

[281] His eyes slid off as if they’d lost their grip.

[295] Davies seemed to feel tremors run through Angus; neurons misfiring like a suppressed storm. He didn’t care, however.

[313] The air had grown viscid with mortality.

[373] His scars looked like streaks of acid under his eyes, burning deeper and deeper into his cheeks. Heat poured off him as if he were overflowing.

[381] Her heart beat in her ears, the veinous funeral march of her inadequacy.

[395] [She was] shivering as if the cold had become metaphysical.

[441] Sweat oozed like wax from his skin.

[454] [Sib was] throwing the torque of his shoulders and the strength of his arms like projectiles at Nick’s ribs and kidneys.

[488] Koina regarded him with darkness stirring in the depths of her gaze. The restrained tension of her cheeks and forehead hinted at bleak bones beneath the skin.

[510] His eyes were so full of white fear that they appeared to have no irises.

[527] Nick let out a clenched laugh.

[538] Nick leered back at him from under his eyebrows.

[577] His beard moved like a blade whenever he spoke or turned his head.

[658] Through a red, squalling, visual knife of pain, he found the controls on his chestplate.

And here, at the risk of trespassing on your patience, is The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die (1996)

[15] In the pockets of her labcoat her fingers twitched as if they were entering data on a purely metaphysical keypad.

[38] A pallor of betrayal seemed to leach the color from her cheeks; even from her eyes.

[38] Indignation and confusion appeared to flush through Chief Mandich in waves, staining his skin with splotches like the marks of an infection.

[39] In one sense Hashi noticed the reactions of his companions. But in another he paid no attention to them at all.

[46] Hashi spread his hands disingenuously.

[46] Now at last Warden permitted himself a reaction, which may have been surprise.

[47] Anodyne Systems, the sole licensed manufacturer of SOD-CMOS. [This acronym is so wonderful it almost caused me to forgive the rest of the series. Ed.]

[51-2] That substance is a coenzyme. Inherently inert … it combines with some of the human body’s natural apoenzymes to form an artificial holoenzyme. [I'm not a trained chemist. Is that what the word "inert" means? Ed.]

[63] Mandich murmured an obscenity between his teeth.

[66] He appeared to shudder like a man being sickened by uncertainty.

[67] The DA director wheezed. He fluttered his hands in front of his face to ward off emotions for which he had no use.

[97] He shook his head. Carried by its own momentum, his head continued rocking from side to side on his weak neck.

[109] Her voice ached like Morn’s arm.

[117] Food and coffee had rubbed the smudge from his gaze.

[147] Dolph’s deep, rumbling tone sharpened trenchantly.

[168] His companions were vivid with tension. Their postures shouted of dangers Min didn’t know how to evaluate.

[180] Angus snorted past his grin.

[255] His eyes emanated a moist heat that Warden had never seen in them before.

[317] Mins jaws clenched and loosened as if she were chewing iron.

[342] Cleatus was full of explosives—metaphorically speaking … his eyes held a lupine glitter, and his beard bristled like wire.

[366] Smoke seeped out of her hair as if the mind under it had been burned to the ground.

[375] Lane hid a grin behind a fringe of unclean hair.

[420] Fasner spoke so fiercely that acoustic shatter fretted the edges of his voice.

[471] His voice sounded as bleak as hard vacuum. [So that's what vacuum sounds like! Excellent. Ed.]

[437] Darkness mottled his face: blood and dirt marked his skin like livid stigmata. His heavy arms beat anguish against his sides. ‘Stop it!’ … Instinctively he aimed his rage like despair at Morn.

[447] Standing rigid, as if he were remembering a crucifixion, he shouted.

[474] She was a good fifteen centimeters taller. But the ominous intensity he radiated, the sense of critical mass he conveyed, made him seem larger. He gave the impression that there was no limit to how far he might expand.

[476] Every eye in the room clung to her urgently.

[480] Blaine wore her sexuality like an accusation.

[485] Sen Abdullah gaped like a man who couldn’t breathe well enough to grasp the opportunity Koina had given him.

[499] In response he brandished his beard at her like a club.

[525] Ceatus closed his mouth. But he left his demand hanging in the air.

[525] The sound of knives filled Hyland’s voice.

[667] Mikka swallowed a knot of tears.

That's enough. I brandish my beard at these books, like a club.

A 1980 Schoolgirl Imagines Her Relationship With Her Computer in the Year 2000

From Nancy Krienberg and Elizabeth K Stage's 'Girls Just Want To Have Computers', in Richard Rhodes (ed) Visions of Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster 2000), 336:

I would ask my computer to find me a perfect husband. I would tell it to tell me where to find the prettiest clothes and tell me where to get my hair done. Tell me where the most famous restaurant is in the world. Then I would meet my future husband, get married, have children -- two, named Ben and Angie -- then I would get a divorce and raise my children on my own till they're grown. And then it's just me and my computer. All alone again.

Don't know the name of the schoolgirl author of this; but it's great.

Ian Watson, God's World (1979)

Coming back to Watson for a while, hoovering up odd novels and things I didn't get around to before. Why? Well, I'm toying with writing a short-ish critical monograph on Watson and SF generally. This would be called Unelementary: Ian Watson and the Indeducibility of Science Fiction, and would be (since I really can't imagine any actual publisher, academic or otherwise, being interested in putting it out) e-book only. Some of this is drafted, actually; and I may or may not have time over the summer to pull the whole thing together. 'May not' encompasses all the many other things I have to do this summer; but 'may' registers the realisation that if I don't pull it together soon-ish I probably won't ever. Not that this latter state of affairs would be the worst thing in the world. I labour under no illusions about the number of potential readers on tenter-hooks to find out what I think about Watson (or 'lit'-y SF more generally, which would be the real focus). Still, there's small Pointless Imp of Completion in my brain, so I may get to it. Who knows? It might even sell in the single figures.

At any rate, I read this novel over the last few days, after chancing upon it in a charity shop. Viz.:

'His first novel of outer space!' as the first-edition cover blurb boasts; a slightly odd claim given that extrasolar aliens arrive (from outer space!) in The Embedding (1973), and are met by Earth spacemen (in outer space!); plus The Martian Inca (1977) involves a deal of to-ing and fro-ing (through outer space!) between Earth and Mars. Plus the characters in Alien Embassy (1977) travel to other stars (in outer space!) via astral projection. But, look; let's not split hairs.

Now, some of Watson's novels are nothing short of masterpieces. Some, though, don't quite come off, broadly speaking; and I'd class this title with that second group. Mind you, even when Watson's novels don't entirely succeed, they are never less than interesting failures. And God's World may be Watson's most interesting failure of all.

I'd certainly say it's not one of his best-known novels, and so some plot-summary is probably in order. This will include spoilers (so be warned). In fact, to forestall that, why don't you pop over to the SF Gateway? Then you can buy a copy of the book and read it before going any further. Indeed, I'd recommend buying as many Ian Watson books as you can and reading them all. You won't regret it.

So: God's World. The premise is of a scientifically irrefutable revelation of the divine: a miracle apparition, Easter Day Jerusalem 1997. To Christians it appears as 'a tall shimmering creature of golden light ... with wounds in the wrists and ankles and a deep gash in its side.' [31]. Jews see 'a tall, white-bearded, white-robed figure' speaking Hebrew. Moslems see 'a black-bearded man wearing kaftan and turban', calling out in Arabic 'Come to God's World, come to success!' Similarly theologically specific apparitions follow across the globe 'as the wold spun on its course that Easter day' and the message is:

I am the prophet/angel/messenger/message
from Heaven/the heavens/space
where God lives/where God's World is.
There is a star in the River/constellation Eridanus.
The star is unique/an isolated star.
Your best souls will go to Heaven/will ascend/fly there.
If you die, you will live again, undying.
Now there is war in Heaven/conflict/struggle. Gird your arms about you! [33]

The message goes on: a space drive will be provided, and believers or 'pure souls' must be ballasted with unbelievers ('hard souls') 'so you will travel more steadily.' A pyramid-shaped space drive is unearthed in the Gobi desert; a ship constructed (The Pilgrim Crusader) and crewed with seven materialist rational 'rats' and seven spiritual 'psychs'. Travel is through 'High Space', and time to destination is indicated by a green-line 'probability' of arrival. Were the ship crewed only with psychs, it might travel almost instantaneously; but the passage would be unstable and perhaps dangerous.

The book starts, actually, with the narrator 'Amy Dove' fucking her fellow psych Peter Muir, which may well have been nicely startling in 1979. It's still quite a bracing way to start a novel, although its idiom is a little too close to D H Lawrence fucking-as-transcendence for my liking (the fact that the sex happens in the novel's hyper-dimensional, 'High Space' may explain this). The voyage to God's World through the 'grainy mottled sea of trembling, incoherent half-light' of High Space is marked by a lot of metaphysical discussion amongst the crew, and one big event: the ship gets into a battle with another ship, and fires all its missiles (this other ship is actually a time-refracted version of the The Pilgrim Crusader, or something); and then the weapons' master Jacobik is murdered, throttled after what looks like a B/D sex session. The novel, without much urgency, eventually explains his death; but the practicalities are less important than the symbolic force of it: life and death, fucking and dying, bliss and agony, yin and yang.

This crime disheartens the psychs, which holds the ship back; but eventually the Pilgrim Crusader arrive at 82 Eridani. Their destination is a moon orbiting a gas giant itself orbiting the star; but before they can reach it they are attacked by insectile aliens, 'like giant black scorpions, with eight legs and jointed pincers resembling hands ... and jaws. and claws' [79]. Most of the crew escape in a shuttle and make it to 'Getka' as God's World is called, where they find strange humanoid golden-haired aliens, and a paradisical landscape. The Getkans live in cities; and each city has a full-size model replica of itself across the river, seemingly deserted. The book treads water for a hundred pages or so as Amy and her remaining crewmates learn the world of Getka. There's some interesting speculation here, though it leaves the narrative underpowered.

The Getkans (plus a few, though not many, examples of other alien life who have rocked up on their world) live lives balanced between the material cosmos we're all familiar with and a sort of dreamtime spirit dimension. They wear masks to access this; although when one of the humans playfully puts a mask on it nearly kills him and leaves him in a catatonic state -- you have to be trained to do it, and more paired with a life-partner who then dies (or you die; doesn't matter so long as one of you do). Then your bond means that s/he lives on in you in the material world and you live with him/her in the spirit world. The model cities are, when seen through the dreaming spirit eye, teeming with life. The humans start to grow golden hairs on their skin (the hairs are a needful part of the spiritual connection; a sort of parasitical mode of alien life that links matter to the spirit realm) and are finally able to don the masks:

At his (at their) touch, my vision rotates. Below me, outside, is Manfaa. Immediately the empty lanes become thronged thoroughfares, as the island expands hugely. The roofless walls mutate into palaces. The courts of emptiness are crowded amphitheatres. The dry alleys are sapphire canals afloat with junks and ornate house-boats. The city must hold at least half a million natives. [144]

In fact there are many levels, or varieties, of 'heaven' in the dream dimension, including one like hell ('a city of horrors: siege and pillage, rape and fire. The victors set out torture instruments in the streets.') The gas giant, a regular planet in the material cosmos, is revealed to be a huge vortex of spiritual energy in the dream dimension, which is why this moon is so special. And the scorpion-spider aliens? The Getkans call them 'the vile Group-ones'; hive beings -- 'a single entity, with a machine for their lord. This blinds them to the beauty of the dream worlds. They cannot enter them.' [150] But it doesn't matter that the Group-ones stole the human ship, or even that only six of the crew escaped. Six is enough: they must pair off, one from each pairing must die and when that happens each couple will be intimately linked forever; and the three remaining on the world will be connected with the heaven dimension. Then they can go back to earth directly, with no need of the ship, and bring this new spiritual mode of being to the whole of humanity.

You don't need to have seen Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier to have smelt a rat by now. Whilst awake, the humans on Getka are completely caught up on the spiritual richness and joy of their life, not to mention all their intense transcendent fucking they're doing. But sometimes when they sleep, they are drawn back to their ship, by the consciousnesses of the crew they left behind; and here they get a different side to the story via the machine intelligence that orchestrates the scorpion aliens: the 'Harxine Paracomputers'. The energy vortex is not God, but Satan ('You mean to tell me,' Watson has one character say, rather heavy-handedly, 'God's world is really -- Satan's World?' [166]). As in about a hundred episodes of Doctor Who, this 'Veil Being' is

a quasi life-form which balances on the interface ... between reality and the creative force that is beyond reality. It is part of the "energy circuit" between what you term "God" and the created universe -- in our terms, between the descent of Being into the world and its reprocessing back through death, which is the psychic counterpart of the continual fluxing in and out of existence of the entire cosmos. [165]

The problem with the 'Veil Being', according to the Harxine Paracomputers, is not just that it needs to 'feed' on new life, and so plans on hoovering up the whole of earth into its greedy maw. Worse than that, by keeping life in this static deathless dream dimension it is unbalancing the central dynamic of the whole cosmos, which will threaten everything. The Getkans

are granted paranormal powers and quasi-immortality but they are really controlled and hoodwinked by the corporate Veil Being so that they cannot understand how it is against the proper order of things -- against the reprocessing of lives back into Being, through death. It is a blockage, a tumour, in the flux between Being and existence, between what you term "God", and the world. Since reality is the dream of "God" -- since the universe is imagined into existence from beyond - this blockage must bring about a degradation and ultimate collapse of reality. [166]

Oh no! The problem is the humans forget all they learn asleep when they wake; and continue on their hoyful pilgrimage to the sacred site where one half of each of their couples will die, so uniting them immortally and linking the material and dreamtime. And once that happens, the Veil Being will have access to Earth.

If I'm making the novel sound wholly hokey (in, out, in, out, shake it all about) that's not my intention. It doesn't do the wholly hokey, though there's a degree of hokiness here. But there are also stretches of conceptual invention and cadenzas of metaphysics that make the B-movie set-up ('What They Thought Was God Turned Out To Be A Giant Satanic Vortex!!') seem rather more sturdy than, perhaps, it actually is. And there are many brilliant touches. Watson fills chapters with striking and thought-provoking speculation about the topography of a spirit-matter cosmos. But the Star Trek 5 problem hovers over the whole novel, I feel: the reader is promised something that she is then baulked of. This novel will represent the unrepresentable! Except that it won't, and (of course) can't. How can this not be a tad anticlimactic?

Still, Watson is exploring some metaphysically complex and resonant ideas: for example, the question of whether God is 'Other' (the ultimate Objet Grand A), or actually identity. One character insists that we can only perceive 'epiphany' through 'being what we are': 'God needs a subject that reflects Him, just as we need to be the reflecting subject. Here is a transconscious relationship, of which the ego is merely a portion ... I shall tell you a secret, my friends. The Lord may easily be the image of a loved one, correctly understood ... This is convenient for Man. He cannot know his own self directly, but he can know the whole of the Other, as imagined in himself. In this way a dialogue is possible between two beings who are each other.' But Amy has her doubts:

Suppose there was a race of beings somewhere in the universe who weren't distinct from each other, as we all are. Suppose they were all identical, like ants. Only highly evolved into the bargain. Well, they couldn't conceive ... Otherness, could they? The style of their suzerainty would be submission to themselves -- to a group of identical minds, wouldn't it? This would be their only Lord. [180]

There's something potent in this claustrophobic vision of Absolute Transcendence, especially as a critique of religious praxis. But it's dramatically stifling (as, perhaps, it has to be) in a novel; since a novel must take its momentum from the conflict and resolution generated by difference. This is underlined, I think, by Watson's style. God's World is divided between the plain declarative style of ten thousand space exploration stories ('our current course is taking us sunward, inside the gas giant's orbit. If we leave things alone we'll go into an elliptical sun orbit, bringing us to that hypothetic High Space injection point ...' [73]) and a large amount of dialogue, often densely and rather offputtingly rendered theological or pseudo-philosophical speculation. But from time to time Watson injects lyric intensity to his descriptions. This is most successfully accomplished in accounts of the alien landscape of Getka. Here, for instance, they approach a volcanic island by sea:

Smoky dawn: ash on the deck. Water undulates, smooth and oily, crusted with grey scum. No wave breaks or foams. Dead fish float by, their bellies upwards. The sun is hardly visible, a lemon ghost. Someone has lit a bonfire out at sea. A brazier glows and sparks atop a black cone thrust from the glutinous water. [205]

The worst you could say of this writing is that it flirts with purple; but mostly it stays on the right side of the 'evocative and vivid' line.

The port of Pyx: sickles of stone at the corn of sandbars. In the estuary, silver waders dip and uphead again like an army of automatic toys powered by the simple motion of filling up and emptying out. ... Half a dozen large junks ride at anchor at the dockside. Among serried white buildings, the inevitable pyramid marks the water-front. [211]

I liked this sort of thing. I liked it less when Watson turns this technique on his descriptions of sex, where the vividness provokes an 'eew!' reaction of the sort that almost makes me wonder if that was what Watson was going for in the first place:

He slides inside me: slow dance of swelling tissues, hot muscles, nerves aglow, glissade douce. We are dense with this. Our joy winds us together slowly like twin rubber bands of nerve fibre which seem as if they never reach a snapping point. Ours is snail-love: the slow mutual twining of molluscs. [12]

Rubber bands, hot throbbing snail rumpy pumpy: à chacun son gout, I guess.. Though the 'we are dense with this' is less forgiveable. I know it's anachronistic, but it makes me think of that scene in the first Back to the Future movie where Michael J. Fox's young Dad tries to chat up the girl he fancies by telling her 'I am your destiny', but gets tongue-tied with embarrassment and tells her instead 'I am your density'.

There's a serious point in here, somewhere. Watson, here and elsewhere, reveals himself to be a profoundly Romantic writer, in a very specific sense. This is the sense that his project aligns in key ways with an imaginative spiritual transcendence grounded in the actuality of (especially natural) materialism -- what Abrams famously called 'Natural Supernaturalism'. In that very book, Abrams characterises Wordsworth's core project (one taken up by Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hoderlin -- and later by Yeats, whom Watson actually quotes in God's World) as: 'the shift to a spiritual and moral revolution which will transform our experience of the old world ... to reconstitute trhe grounds of hope and to announce the certainty, or at least the possibility, of a rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth where he will find himself thoroughly at home.' Watsons fondness for balancing 'psych' and materialist 'rat' characters (here, but also in several other novels) is about this, I think; and the ending of God's World comes close to this spiritual-materialism utopian achievement. This is the final paragraph:

For a moment all my life is present, all at once. And who I am, is answered.
Now that knowledge flows back into ...
energy, the creative energy, answering its question
into light, the light beyond light [ellipsis and absent final full-stop in original; 285]

But this also leaves the novel open to critique. Philosopher Richard Eldridge rather neatly summarises Hegel's objection to Romanticism as a whole with a four word precis: 'too much visionary blathering'. It has something to do with the way the transcendent ambition of the conceputalising is undermined by the Scooby Doo logic of the story (you thought it was a real ghost? Nah it's just a petty crook with a rubber mask on: trust the Dawkinsesque meddling kids to disabuse you of any sense of actual supernatural sublimity). I finished God's World feeling strangely unsatisfied, in a way that puzzled as much as disappointed me. The odour of patchouli and the jargon of tantric sex hung a little too pungently over the whole, I think.