Ian Watson is arguably the most important science fiction writer of the past few decades. I was extremely honoured recently to be asked to write the profile of him for this year's Fantasycon programme book; by interesting coincidence, my wife currently has one or two of Ian's early novels on her nightstand, my having recommended them to her. The request to write the profile reminded me there were gaps in my own reading of Ian's work, so I decided to go some way towards rectifying the situation by getting myself a copy of his Yaleen trilogy, one of the high water marks of 1980s sf and a series of novels which I really, really ought to have read at the time.

Because Yaleen is a trilogy, one expects the three novels to be like each other -- just a single tale split up into three. No. This is Watson, remember. The three have each their very different character and concerns. There's an overarching story, but it's nothing so simple as a routine quest or whatever.

The Book of the River presents us with, we're lured into thinking, one of those strange colonized planets Sheri S. Tepper is so expert at depicting: where the human colonists, despite having been there for centuries and having lost contact with the rest of the spacefaring species, still have to solve their world. What needs solving in The Book of the River's case is that it's effectively a world split into two parts, the two banks of an enormous river; on one bank there's a feminist flawed utopia; on the other, observable only through telescope from civilization, is a barbaric male-dominated dystopia where they have enticing habits like burning "witches" alive (rather like much of our own world today, come to think of it). What keeps the two apart is not just the river but the black current (yes, I groaned) that runs down its centre; the current -- which we soon discover is not really a current but a sentient entity, a "worm" -- exercises very strict control over human interactions with the river. Men can travel on it just the once, which typically they do when they journey to the towns where the women who have chosen to wed them live; should a man try to sail the river twice, he goes mad and dies. Women have significantly more freedom -- hence their dominant role in civilization: they're the traders who can sail up and down the river at will, perhaps with a boy in every port. But even women must be wary of the black current, because if they try to be in direct physical contact with it -- as they might be in an attempt to cross the river -- they suffer the same fate as men who try to sail twice.

Our guide to this world is the gossipy, somewhat hyperactive Yaleen, a young woman who's initiated into the sailing guild by drinking a draft of the black current and who basically sees little amiss with her world until her beloved brother, one of a band of male scientists who (because what else is there for drones to do?) are trying to find out what goes on in the barbaric community on the far bank, succeeds in crossing the river by walking along its bed in a sort of primitive diving suit; natch, he's not long among the primitives before they burn him at the stake. The trauma of witnessing this from afar is enough to set Yaleen off on the quest to solve her world, and in particular to solve the worm.

The Book of the Stars starts off as a continuation of The Book of the River. However, just when you're settling yourself in for what you've come to assume is a fairly straightforward trilogy (inasfar as anything written by Watson could be described as straightforward), it goes somewhere completely different.

One result of Yaleen's efforts to solve her world is that for a while the black current retreats from the river, so that the barbarians may invade civilization; their actions are hideously brutal, although the campaign is finally unsuccessful. Perhaps more importantly, the current/worm decides to befriend Yaleen, and from it she discovers that it's in effect a minor deity, implanted here in the world by a human- and later self-created deity, a computer complex back on earth that has directed the entire human galactic colonization program in order (as she learns later in the book) to construct what might be regarded as a sort of super-telescope that'll solve the universe even if its single use will annihilate the human species.

(Have you noticed what a lot of solving there is going on? That's what Yaleen -- and much of the rest of Watson's fiction -- is all about. It's also what quite a lot of my own fiction is about. I blame Watson, and my somewhat-youthful exposure to his work.)

Yaleen is murdered by one of the primitives and, thanks to her friendship with the worm, is transported to earth and into the continent-wide compound where the Godmind retains all the "souls" it has drawn in unto itself for observation, so that it might learn from the widely varying experiences they've had on widely varying planets. It's there that Yaleen learns quite how radically the Godmind is prepared to modify the human colonists it delivers to different worlds; while the humans of her own world are much like you and me, other freshly incarnated "souls" around her tell her of their existence as near-static lumps on high-grav planets, or as winged fliers elsewhere, and so on. Whatever their past existence, here in the compound they're incarnated as orthodox-human infants.

When the toddler Yaleen is sent out to spread her farworld-derived wisdom among the peoples of Europe, she's soon recruited by one of the groups rebelling against the Godmind. This leads her (after much not noted here, including a direct confrontation with and terrorist strike against the Godmind itself) into an astonishing toppling through various astonishingly diverse worlds and their likewise astonishingly diverse cultures as she serially occupies a number of individuals embedded in those cultures. In the end she gets back to her own world, but not in any way she might have expected: she's born as her own (much) younger sister Narya, which is why, as we've already seen, Narya, a toddler at the time of Yaleen's "death", was always so odd.

The Book of Being, the third in the cycle, is in effect Narya-Yaleen's story, as she tries to prepare her world to resist the effects of the Godmind's genocidal effort to use its "telescope". This is also by far the most bewildering of the three novels, with for much of its extent a fragmented narrative that often seems to be throwing up more internal inconsistencies than the reader's mind can easily cope with; the novel, and the narrative(s), are eventually in their turn solved for the reader by a footnote on the penultimate page of the book's Afterword, dammit! It's a typical example of Watson's playfulness, which playfulness, you always later discover, is anything but . . .

Much of these three books is written in the fashion of a light-hearted, almost frivolous romp -- thanks to the breathless voice of the somewhat amoral yet at root gutsy Yaleen -- but in fact the trilogy belies its tone, being extraordinarily inventive, full of genuinely challenging ideas, and willing to tackle head-on some fairly weighty philosophical/ethical considerations. All of which is what the purported "literature of ideas" is supposed to do but far too rarely actually does.

So, within three novels you get a Tepperesque planetary romance, a Stapledonesque cosmic re-evaluation, and a whoknowswho-esque piece of New Wavery. I would regard that as a bargain, no? It's also one of the more significant achievements of fantastic literature that you're loikely to come across. And I loved it.

By the way: The copy of the trilogy that I bought is the natty BenBella one-volume version, called just Yaleen; it appears to be a direct reprint of the earlier SFBC omnibus The Books of the Black Current, and has a spiffy cover painting (illustrating a scene in the final pages of The Book of Being, yet!) by my old pal Jael. Apparently the painting was used on the cover of an earlier incarnation of The Book of Being and BenBella's Glenn Yeffeth thought it'd be ideal for the trilogy as a whole. All of which I mention just because it goes to show how this is a small world, etc. ( )