The title story in this, Ian Watson’s tenth collection, provoked that thought. The eponymous butterflies are super mobile telephones – in fact, they can fly, making them super-mobile, as well; ‘phones (or ‘fones’ as mobiles seem to be called throughout this volume) which can not only predict what number you want to call, they can read your mind, remove your memories, and leave you with others. Tom Cavendish goes seeking treatment for amnesia and finds, almost immediately, recollections of an affair with his psychiatrist, an affair that was someone else’s. Not dis-similarly, Kate Quantrell, in “Man of Her Dreams”, in her eagerness to progress in the company takes on the company’s dream implants. Unfortunately, she has not bargained on the need to make the dreams pay – it is difficult to meet your dream lover when you have to click through the advertisements to reach the next stage of happiness – Kate’s mind, like her entertainment, is now in the hands of someone else.

Another Kate, in “A Free Man”, thinks “I hope this isn’t badly written porn about me” but it is not the eroticism implied that I link “The Butterflies of Memory” with “Man of Her Dreams” because they are some of the stories in this collection that had input from workshops or collaborators. Kate’s mind and love were not only in the hands of her employers, they have been manipulated by SF writers, for as Ian Watson has found, we cannot escape the invasion of other things.

Included here is “Hijack Holiday” which could be mis-read as a pastiche of the Twin Towers 9/11 attack, were it not made clear that it was written a year before. Or consider “How to be a Fictionaut” (both this story and “Hijack Holiday” first appeared in INTERZONE), with its “subconscious plagiarism. Thirty years ago, you read a story. Suddenly you come up with a brilliant idea. Unfortunately your brilliant idea is exactly the same as in that story, but you don’t remember this.” It seems to be a comment on this year’s scandals in US publishing – indeed, it seems it has either been plagiarised in or it plagiarises many a broadsheet column commenting on the scandals, except that it was published in 1996, ten years ago. I could mention the mind-stealing ‘fones’ anticipating Stephen King’s CELL, but chance reproduction is not the most significant aspect of Watson’s work. Rather it is the realisation that the world of Ian Watson is an Escher-like world, and everyone’s observation is necessary to another’s display.

If you wish Watson will transport you around the universe; he will descend on planets with wooden surfaces sailed by yachts on wheels; he will introduce you to beasts from other dimensions in an Oxford Common Room; he will take you through invisible walls to meet Centaurs; he will take you underground, and there he will introduce you to time-travellers, time-travelling Nazis at that, in “Giant Dwarfs”, the fifteenth of the seventeen stories here. And perhaps those Nazis will take you back to the first story, “An Appeal to Adolf”, which may be the last thing I discuss. It is certainly concerned with the end of Dieter Schmidt, its unhappy protagonist, who makes the appeal to Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, yet, oddly never mentions in the story nor in the story notes at the end of the book, that his is a “final appeal”.

On the face of it, “An Appeal to Adolf” is a simple alternate history, in which the Nazis are winning, and a battleship large enough to bridge Calais to Dover is sailing up from Africa with the Fuhrer on board. In his note Ian Watson discusses the history of Hitler and Wittgenstein’s schooldays and then diverges again: of course, Wittgenstein did not broadcast war propaganda, but he did not sit in Cambridge decrypting with Alan Turing, either, as Watson implies (he was a hospital porter in Newcastle-on-Tyne). Hitler, on the other hand, made a broadcast to Britain – in fact, he made “A Last Appeal to Reason”, as the speech was titled when the Luftwaffe dropped copies over this island in the late Spring of 1940, offering a negotiated peace, or surrender as it usually called in English. That is the appeal, and that is what Ian Watson does not mention – he has taken an appeal by Adolf and reversed it, to become an appeal to Adolf.

In the final notes Ian Watson includes one of his poems. It ends: “From our cage, into otherness.” And he is taking others with him, though perhaps not as they would have expected.