Mind, body, spirit, space: Alien Embassy (1977) by Ian Watson

A challenging novel of mysticism, power, and alien contact

Starships and faster-than-light travel are load-bearing elements of science fiction, convenient narrative devices to put characters in close contact with the alien other. Ian Watson’s fourth novel Alien Embassy, originally published in 1977, explores an altogether different means of communing with the galaxy. Set in a post-disaster future in which western technology has been largely abandoned, this is a story rooted instead in eastern mysticism. Free of its “mad urge to conquer space with machines”, humankind can instead use the power of the mind to bridge the gap between the stars.

Continuing Watson’s run of challenging, idea-packed novels, Alien Embassy also develops his fascination with communication, our limited grasp of reality, and the fraught quest for transcendence. Like The Embedding (1973) and The Jonah Kit (1975) before it, this is bracing and ambitious SF, arguably best suited to readers with a strong grounding in the genre. Short on physical action but long on sweeping conceptual breakthroughs and deep philosophical speculation, Alien Embassy is a powerful example of Watson’s under-recognised contribution to British SF in the 1970s.

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“Ecstasy, not hydrazine”

The year is 2170 and the world has undergone vast change over the course of two centuries. It is an unenlightened time, and few people are aware of how the new order came about - following a catastrophic population crash in the 1990s. Only a few advanced technologies are used: computer-controlled ocean vessels, solar panels for electricity generation, and implanted “contracapsules” to keep the population in check. Aircraft are very rare, and even the notion of long-distance travel is frowned upon.

Lila Makindi is a young woman living on the coast of Tanzania. After undergoing rigorous testing, she is recruited to join “Bardo” - the Space Communications Administration operated by the world government. Her selection and training takes her first to semi-abandoned Miami, and later to Lhasa, high in the mountains of Tibet. Lila is to become a “pilot”, exploiting her natural talent to undergo a form of astral travel to worlds orbiting distant stars. 

Lila and her colleagues are inducted into the strange world of Bardo, and into its rigid sexual, reproductive, and spiritual strictures. They are to be the vanguard of humanity’s newfound destiny in space. As Lila puts it, “ecstasy, not hydrazine, would be our rocket fuel to the stars.” In time, though, Lila and her fellow pilots begin to suspect that they are being misled by the state. Peeling away layer after layer of deception, Lila becomes increasingly troubled by what Bardo has in store.

Conceptual breakthrough as power structure

In at least one key way, Alien Embassy marks a break with Watson’s earlier work. “My first three novels all had triple story lines”, he recalled in 2008, “then with [..] Alien Embassy, I shifted to [a] first person narrative in the mouth of a black African woman (which I suppose was innovative at the time, and maybe still is).” Lila is something of an everywoman, told she is special by a government agency she is increasingly suspicious of but has little power to oppose.

Like Brian Aldiss’ novel Non-Stop (1958), Alien Embassy is a formidable showcase of the conceptual breakthrough. As the story progresses, Lila experiences a chain of breakthroughs in her understanding of Bardo, their methods and goals, and even the nature of the universe. In Aldiss’ novel, passage from one conceptual frame to another is a question of position. This is also true in Watson’s story, as Lila’s arrival in new locations exposes her to further revelations. However, the breakthrough is also a function of power: in Alien Embassy, the higher Lila’s status, the more complete and disturbing her view of reality becomes.

Sex and spirituality

Also disturbing to some is Watson’s emphasis on sex, which is a key part of the novel’s first half in particular. In order to achieve astral spaceflight - the projection of mind beyond Earth’s embrace - Lila and her fellow recruits are paired with strangers for spiritually charged sexual unions. It is the fusion of male and female psychic energies, the pilots are told, which allows their thoughts and perceptions to travel over interstellar distances. As this is a science fiction novel, this is a less than strictly accurate explanation.

Alien Embassy is not just steeped in eastern mysticism but also in the opening up of discussions about sexuality in the decade of The Joy of Sex. Watson’s work has provoked revulsion over its sexual content, but this is arguably explained in part by the general “dis-ease” with sex as an SF subject observed by Peter Nicholls in the SFE.

“I can know the ways of heaven”

One of the most striking aspects of Alien Embassy is its depiction of a society based around the rejection of real experience, and on a kind of manipulative sophistry about psychic “action at a distance”. In the novel, ideas from Tibetan thought are transformed by Bardo into a repressive dogma, restricting knowledge to a chosen few. Travel, and experience of the real world, is highly restricted. “What did flying ever bring people”, Lila is asked, “but a few handfuls of dust from the next-door world?” It is easy to make a ready comparison with the inward-looking retreat into vapid fakeness that is such a visible strain of 21st century culture.

A Times reviewer was quite right to say that Alien Embassy “hums with notions as a hive of bees”. Lila’s experiences see her not only join an interstellar sex cult, but also meet birdlike aliens in an identity-scrambling symbiotic relationship with trees, and crystalline creatures that communicate using natural lasers. This is an intellectually intense novel written in a fine literary style, and a worthwhile part of Watson’s legacy.

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• Previously covered here: Watson’s earlier novels The Embedding (1973) and The Jonah Kit (1975).
  
• In 2024, Phil Burton-Cartledge wrote about the novel, calling it “a stunning work of imagination, and is very much on the readable side of mind-bending genre fiction.”
  
• For other silicon-based, laser-emitting lifeforms, see Alan Dean Foster’s novel Sentenced to Prism (1985). 
  
• One of Watson’s most amusing achievements was freaking out generations of Warhammer 40,000 fans with his tie-in novels, the first in the setting. The sexual and other weird content he included are almost the stuff of legend.