Kirkus Reviews QR Code
THE GREAT ESCAPE by Ian Watson

THE GREAT ESCAPE

by Ian Watson

Pub Date: May 1st, 2001
ISBN: 1-930846-09-6
Publisher: Golden Gryphon

A new collection from Watson (his first since The Coming of Vertumnus, 1994), comprising 19 typically eclectic pieces, 1995–99. In the title story, demons plan an assault on the deity by physically propelling hell toward Him! Equally striking, Hercule Poirot investigates a series of bizarre murders aboard a starship—but only for as long as the ship remains in hyperspace. A psychologist, part-nanomachine, part-software, delves into a troubled mathematician's brain. In a recasting of E.M. Forster's famous `The Machine Stops,” a worldwide VR/e-mail system, rather than physical hardware, breaks down. And fantasy convention-goers battle an invasion of weasel-like beings. Elsewhere, the ideas continue to flow but the drama falters. Self-aware quantum computers figure in a sort of prototype of the novel Hard Questions (1997). An obsessed hang-glider pilot searches for the lost “Amber Room” of the Russian tsars. Likewise fixated, a couple blindly collects worthless china knickknacks. Jesus' twin brother heads for contact with aliens. Coffins, complete with mummified alien occupants, bombard the solar system. A murdered wife returns to haunt her computer games-designer husband. Old folks, rather than dying, have their personalities loaded into a relative's brain. Time itself regresses in cycles back toward the primordial slime. A cryogenically preserved head wakes in a surreal far future. Also, less satisfyingly: urban myths, autism, vampires, pre-Homeric gods, and magic boxes.

Watson's ability to conjure up weird and terrifying situations blazes forth; more troublesome are the stories that collapse into pointless overelaboration, and characters that too often remain improbably passive.