According to a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, Ian Watson is "probably the best thinker" in British science fiction. "I'm attempting to alter the states of mind of my readers, to make them more conscious of the operating programs that are running their brains--the sort of thing that John Lilly refers to as 'metaprogramming,'" Watson told Charles Platt in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. "I'm interested in ways of examining the structure of your thinking, and trying to present narratives that make people think a bit about the pattern and style of their thoughts, and what alternative thought-structures they could enter into. That is what I say science fiction ought to be about, presenting you with an alternative-reality paradigm, a different way of conceptualizing reality and the universe." Watson's novels and stories present an ongoing fictional exploration of the nature of...