Overbearing Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Hammond is already regarded as an unwelcome genius when he makes his latest discovery. Grudgingly backed by his truculent colleagues and his unfaithful wife, Hammond invites the world's press to a radio observatory in Mexico where he announces that the universe is a phantom cosmos, a mere byproduct of the true reality created by God. Earth therefore exists only by default and is even more contingent than mankind already suspected. As throngs of religious fanatics, the poor and outlaw bikers on chopped hogs gather outside the perimeter fence of the observatory, American agents visit Tokyo, where the Japanese authorities hold a boy who appears to have the consciousness of a lost astronaut melded with his own. Believing the child to be linked with a Soviet experiment to convert whales cybernetically into anti-submarine weapons, the scientists discover the truth about cetacean communication. The clicks of the cachalots not only resonate through the oceans of Earth but they echo events deep in the void of outer space.

As the above indicates, Ian Watson is a writer overflowing with notions and a veritable dam-burst of wayward concepts has gushed from his pen since the publication of his first book (The Embedding) in 1973. The Jonah Kit is typical of Watson's work - spiky, complex, adroitly written and both breathless and bracing in its willingness to scale intellectual heights. Equally at home in the social sciences as he was with the harder disciplines, Watson came to be regarded as the premier British SF writer of ideas in the seventies. Many younger authors owe him a considerable debt. Few genre novelists before him were willing to make such difficult demands on their readers or were able to provide such corresponding rewards. Today, intoxicating invention overload of the kind Watson pioneered is commonplace in SF writing. With its invigoratingly dyspeptic characters, The Jonah Kit is a striking reminder of the harshness of the mid-seventies, when the hippie dream had evanesced and our world began to face up to the problems that loom even larger now.