Book description
Charles Spark is an expert on body language, a bestselling author and a
consultant (or walking lie detector) much in demand with industry and
government. So when the aliens arrive, who better to join the team that
will attempt to understand them? But even though these insectoid aliens
- the "Flies" - in their pyramid-ship speak both English and
Russian, they seem unreadable. "We have come to your planet to
remember it," they say and at first they seem indeed to be a
bizarre group of intergalactic tourists. When human beings start to
interfere, things begin disappearing. The Dome of St Peter's in Rome is
the first to go, followed by downtown Prague, old Mombasa, Munich, the
heart of New Orleans. In an effort to understand what has happened,
Spark, and a strange group of pilgrims, embark on a bizarre journey to
Mars - where the city of Munich has reappeared in a canyon. And where
time, and memory, have become manifest. 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.
