Ian Watson (1943–2026)
SF author Ian Watson, 82, died April 13, 2026 in Gijón, Spain.
Watson was born in England on April 20, 1943. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in English literature, later obtained a research degree in English and French 19th-century literature, and went on to teach across the world. After his first novel The Embedding (1973) won a John W. Campbell Award, and The Jonah Kit (1975) won a British Science Fiction Association Award and an Orbit Award, he started to write full-time in 1976.
Among Watson’s more notable works are the books of the Black Current, the Books of Mana, the Waters of Destiny series with Andy West, multiple Warhammer 40,000 novels, novel Deathhunter (1981), Hugo Award nominees “The Very Slow Time Machine” (1979) and “Slow Birds” (1983), collection Slow Birds and Other Stories (1985), Clarke Award nominee Whores of Babylon (1989), BSFA Award winner “The Beloved Time of Their Lives” (2009) with Roberto Quaglia, and novella The Monster, The Mermaid, and Doctor Mengele (2021). His well-over-200 works of genre short fiction were published in such magazines and anthologies as Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction/Fantasy (2002), ParSec, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (2007), and Weird Tales, as well as in his over 20 collections, including Japan Tomorrow (1977), Evil Water and Other Stories (1988), The Butterflies of Memory (2007), The Best of Ian Watson (2014), and The Chinese Time Machine (2023). He wrote several dozen works of speculative poetry and many associational essays. He worked with Stanley Kubrick to adapt Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” into a film later completed by Steven Spielberg, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He edited many issues of Foundation and The SFWA Bulletin between the ‘70s and ‘90s and multiple anthologies, as recently as The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (2012) with Ian Whates.
He is survived by his wife Cristina Macía, and his daughters Jessica Black and Laura Watson. “At the express wish of the deceased, do not buy flowers. BUY BOOKS.”
For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
