“Ambassador” finally showed up in my "Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes " anthology, albeit in a somewhat updated and up-tarted (but every bit as ugly and futile) form. It was my one true foray into spaceships-and-rayguns science fiction until Blindsight (still in progress). And in either a clever nod to continuity or a pathetic recycling of unoriginal ideas, the thematic tagline of this story shows up in Blindsight as well.
Bethlehem
This showed up in Tesseracts 5, edited by Yves Meynard and Robert Runté, one of a semiregular antho series put out by Tesseracts Books of Edmonton (now engulfed and incorporated into Edge Books, of Calgary). It basically uses a failed relationship as a vantage point on global ecological collapse, through the eyes of a failed academic who’s learned that quantum mechanics can be used for things beyond the usual parallel worlds and DVD players.
Denial, for instance…
Flesh Made Word
This was my second sale, to a small Canadian mag called “Prairie Fire” back in 1994. Think “Max Headroom” meets “Terms of Endearment”. A lot of people seem to like it, although I keep wondering if it isn’t a teeny bit wet. It does, after all, involve a dead cat; so I post it here in memory of the recentlydeparted Cygnus T.
Home
This is a nifty little piece, albeit nothing new to those familiar with Starfish. It started life as a coda to that book, ultimately discarded except for a paragraph or two that ended up elsewhere in the plot. But it’s a creepy enough tale in its own right, and stands on its own, and it might even make the point better than the original “A Niche” did. (It certainly does so more efficiently; smaller cast, fewer words, less plot.) Ultimately it came out in On Spec in the summer of 1999, coinciding with Starfish’s initial release.
Bulk Food
This story has that certain verissimilitude that speaks of first-hand experience.
During my brief tenure as a credentialed whore at UBC’s Marine Mammal Unit, I interacted extensively with aquarium apologists, animal rights activists, and behind-the-scenes grunts in their natural habitats. I observed them. I took notes. I resisted the temptation to toss them cookies as a reward for their performances, as I resisted the (somewhat stronger) temptation to break their fucking skulls over the endless political bullshit that kept me from doing any real biology.
What I couldn’t resist was the temptation to write this story. I had a lot of help from my collaborator—not so much on the biology perhaps, but definitely on the funny bits. “Bulk Food” first appeared in On Spec in 1999; the illustration that ran with it is on display in the Gallery.
The science—the resident/transient stuff, the infant-mortality rates, all the chrome that predates The Breakthrough—is pretty much legit. Race Rocks is a real marine mammal hangout. Those familiar with the layout of the Vancouver Public Aquarium might experience a certain sense of deja vu as they follow Doug Largha on his adventures. The characters themselves are, sadly, more real than you’d like to believe; in fact, even the names bear a certain (but utterly nonprosecutable) similarity to actual public figures on both sides of the whalesin-captivity debate.
God help me, looking back I almost miss those duplicitous scumbags.
[BACK] Peter Watts’s first story for Futures failed to provoke the desired howls of envious outrage from former colleagues who’d sneered at his decision to leave academia and write science fiction, and who then spent years trying desperately to get published in Nature. He hopes that more satisfying outbursts will result from repeated publication.
About the Author
PETER WATTS is a science fiction writer and a reformed marine-mammal biologist. He is the author of the Rifters trilogy, a winner of the Aurora, Hugo and Shirley Jackson awards and a Locus, Sturgeon and Campbell award nominee. Watts lives in Toronto.
More at: www.rifters.com
Peter Watts, Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories
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