Variously described as "one of the best hard-sf writers alive", "the twenty-first century's answer to John Brunner", and "a floppy big-nosed muppet with bad posture" — has spent much of his adult life trying to decide whether to be a writer or a scientist, ending up as a marginal hybrid of both. He spent ten years getting a bunch of degrees in the ecophysiology of marine mammals, and another ten trying make a living on those qualifications without becoming a whore for special-interest groups. This proved somewhat tougher that it looked; throughout the nineties he was paid by the animal welfare movement to defend marine mammals; by the US fishing industry to sell them out; and by the Canadian government to ignore them. He eventually decided that since he was fictionalising science anyway, he might as well add some characters and plot and try selling to a wider market than the Journal of Theoretical Biology.
His success has been, shall we say, mixed. His first novel, "Starfish", netted a "Notable Book of the Year" nod from the New York Times, an honorable mention for John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and rejections from both German and Russian publishing houses on the grounds that it was "too dark". (Being considered too dark for the Russians remains one of Watts's proudest accomplishments.) This also marked the beginning of a diffuse cult following of angst-ridden blogging teenaged girls who identified with Starfish's central character.
"Starfish" was universally praised for its evocation of the deep-sea environment; the applause for its rendering of the surface world was somewhat more muted. The sequel, "Maelstrom" (2001, Tor), takes place almost entirely on land: it therefore avoids the elements that readers most loved about the first book, replacing them with a sprawling entropic dystopia in which Sylvia Plath might have felt at home, if Sylvia Plath had had a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. The critical response was generally as positive as for "Starfish"; both books received starred reviews from Booklist, and Maelstrom may mark the first time that the NY Times used the terms "exhilarating" and "deeply paranoid" to describe the same novel. "Maelstrom"'s release did, however, mark the end of a diffuse cult following of angst-ridden blogging teenage girls who identified with "Starfish"'s central character.
"βehemoth", the concluding volume of what had inadvertently become the "Rifters Trilogy", was released by Tor Books in two volumes for reasons Watts understands even though he thinks they (verb redacted) the (adjective redacted) (anatomical noun redacted). Even bisected, and notwithstanding a certain inevitable sense of been-there-done-that, "βehemoth" garnered a fair bit of critical praise, although more squeamish reviewers grumbled that Watts had gone too far with this whole sexual sadism thing.
Watts' latest book, "Blindsight "(Tor 2006) might be best described as a literary first-contact novel exploring the nature and evolutionary significance of consciousness, with space vampires. Astonishingly, it did not tank. In fact it survived rejection from half a dozen publishers, a miniscule initial print run, zero preorders from one of the continent's largest book retail chains, an absence of relevant blurbs on an otherwise questionable cover design, and a suicidal Hail-Mary act of desperation in which its author gave the whole thing away for free online under a Creative Commons license — a move which, paradoxically, sent sales through the roof. As of this writing "Blindsight" has gone through four hardcover printings and is being translated into half a dozen languages (including— at long last— German and Russian). It also made the final ballot for the Hugo, John W. Campbell, Sunburst, Locus, and Aurora awards , winning exactly zero of them. If there is a moral to this, Watts does not know what it is.
More recent publications include a story about an evil Holocaust survivor (published in Nature, and soon to be reprinted in Hartwell and Cramer's "Year's Best" anthology), and another about a good pedophile (forthcoming from Solaris in the UK). Watts is presently developing a suite of novels exploring such diverse themes as "Speaking in Tongues" as a research technique in high-energy physics; the fate of the universe; and the impact of giant-squid battles on the stock price of PetroCanada shares. His older short fiction is available on his website, in obscure magazines and anthologies, or bundled together into a thick pamphlet called "Ten Monkeys", "Ten Minutes", from Edge/Tesseract Books.
Biography written by Peter Watts. For more information about Mr. Watts' books, please visit his official website.
