The author Ian Watson, who has died aged 82 after suffering from oesophageal cancer, established his reputation as an exhilarating, intellectually adventurous writer of science fiction with his first novel, The Embedding (1973), winner of the Prix Apollo in France. It was followed by The Jonah Kit (1975), winner of the British Science Fiction Association award. Reviewing his third novel, The Martian Inca (1977), JG Ballard described the author as “the most interesting British SF writer of ideas – or, more accurately, the only British SF writer of ideas”.
Many of Ian’s novels dealt with dauntingly complex, even unanswerable, questions about communication, language, perception and consciousness (human, animal, even alien minds), but others were lighter. Though he was always identified with science fiction, his range as a writer expanded to include horror, fantasy and “the great, lurid, Gothic fun” of the Warhammer franchise books.
