We are very sorry to have to inform you that Ian Watson will be unable to attend P-CON.

We will miss his witty and genial presence, but are sure that he will be over here for another convention before too many years have passed.

Ian Watson was born in 1943, somewhere in the North of England. Despite the somewhat grim surroundings, Ian managed to win a scholarship to study English at Oxford, where he attended Balliol College. He graduated from there in 1963 with a first class Honours degree in English Literature, which he followed up in 1965 with a further degree in English and French nineteenth Century literature, all of which eventually led to him becoming a lecturer in Literature in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and, subsequent to that, a few very formative years in Japan.

Despite being immersed in English Literature, Ian still maintained an abiding interest in science fiction, having begun to read it in the early 1950s. Although he had done a certain amount of dabbling while in Oxford to no real avail, it was as a reaction to living in Tokyo that he finally started writing SF in earnest. He says: "Tokyo seemed the disaster area that SF warns about: a world of overpopulation, pollution, seismic shock, as well as being vibrant with the electronic high jinks of the 21st century. Japan was a thrilling mating of traditional culture, consumerist images and brand names, the cybernetic cool of Buddhism, the Coney Island of Shintoism. I started writing SF as a psychological survival strategy to cope with future shock. Indeed, I hear tell (though not very loudly) that cyberpunk might stem from an article about Japan which I wrote for New Worlds in 1970 . . ."

Ian’s career since then is the stuff of legend. Since his first SF novel, The Embedding was published in 1973, he has written at least thirty nine novels, over fifty short stories, which have been extensively anthologised, not to mention being collected in nine further books, and has also written non-fiction and poetry. He worked extensively with Stanley Kubrick on the story development for the movie AI, which was eventually made by Steven Spielberg. His short story My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl is one of those things that still sticks in my memory, at least twenty-five years after I last read it.

Besides all this, Ian is a fabulously erudite and entertaining speaker, and a genuinely funny man. We welcome him with open arms.