Peter Watts
(rifters.com) is an uncomfortable hybrid of biologist and science-fiction author, known for pioneering the technique of appending extensive technical bibliographies onto his novels; this serves both to confer a veneer of credibility and to cover his ass against nitpickers.
Described by The Globe and Mail as one of the best hard-sf authors alive, his debut novel Starfish was a New York Times Notable Book, while his most recent, Blindsight
- a philosophical rumination on the nature of consciousness which, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires, has become a required text in at least one undergraduate philosophy course
- made the final ballot for numerous genre awards, winning exactly none of them. This may reflect a certain controversy regarding Watts's work in general. His bipartite novel Behemoth, for example, was praised by Publishers Weekly as an
"adrenaline-charged fusion of Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range and William Gibson's Neuromancer" and
"a major addition to 21st-century hard SF," while being simultaneously decried by Kirkus as
"utterly repellent" and "horrific porn." (Watts is happy to embrace the truth of both views.)
A marine biologist formerly resident in Vancouver, he now makes his home in Toronto.
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