The Embedding

With undue smugness, civilized man continues his attempts to master inner and outer space. Psycholinguistic and space-travel projects extend, in different directions, the limits of our knowledge and understanding.

But there are already others in touch with realties which scientists can barely comprehend: a tribe of Amazonian Indians has evolved, under drugs, ways of seeing and expressing which shatter conventional ideas of the real world, and beings from a planet 1103 light years away arrive to offer the secrets of inter-stellar space travel – at a price.

Can we face these challenges, offered by simple savages and ultra-sophisticated aliens? Or are these enormous strides forward too much for us to grasp? In a brilliant novel of staggering invention but powerful scientific authenticity Ian Watson portrays the dilemma of a civilization blinkered by its own outlook and recoiling from its own progress.

Ian Watson was born in England in 1943 and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature. He lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish SF with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. He became a full-time writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding. His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick's death by Steven Spielberg; for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story. Ian Watson lives in Spain.