Book description
Lila Makindi grows up in East Africa in a peaceful and harmonious 22nd
century world, which has succeeded our own age of extravagance,
environmental damage, and warfare. Its citizens know that the Space
Communications Administration, better known as Bardo, is guiding the
planet benevolently, thanks to contact with wise aliens by means, not of
grandiose spaceships, but of psychic travel powered by the sexual
techniques of tantric yoga. Wonderfully, Lila is chosen for psychic
starflight. But she discovers that in reality mental starflight is
spinning a web of protection around the world to safeguard the human
race from a malign alien energy force, the Starbeast. Yet is this the
true reality? Only when Lila travels to Tibet does she discover the
actual, unexpected purpose behind Bardo Ian Watson (1943 - ) Ian
Watson was born in England in 1943 and graduated from Balliol College,
Oxford, with a first class Honours degree in English Literature. He
lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before
beginning to publish SF with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for
the influential New Worlds magazine in 1969. He became a full-time
writer in 1976, following the success of his debut novel The Embedding.
His work has been frequently shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards
and he has won the BSFA Award twice. From 1990 to 1991 he worked
full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A. I.
Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick's death by Steven
Spielberg; for which he is acknowledged in the credits for Screen Story.
Ian Watson lives in Northamptonshire, England.
