Ian Watson

Ian Watson the first champion of Slaanesh is fucking crazy. He's also brilliant. He lives in Spain, spends most of his time at British book conventions and mostly talks at high speed about esoteric weird stuff that would turn Dan Brown's shit into chalk.

From a fa/tg/uy perspective, he's the bloke who wrote the trippy primordial morass from which Warhammer 40K evolved before Black Library was a thing. He wrote Space Marine in 1993, three years after Inquisitor, also by Ian Watson (later re-named Draco), and Deathwing. No one had a fucking clue what they were doing, so we get Squats, Zoats and lasgun-wielding Space Marines. We also get Space Marines out-farting each other with their specially engineered arseholes. It's weird. It's amazing. It's totally not canon, whatever the fuck that means. And if you want it to be canon, it basically is.

Ian has continued to write, of course, and he's got a shelf full of awards for writing weird shit. For example, his recent novel, The Beloved of My Beloved, (co-written with Italian surrealist Roberto Quaglia) features cloned clitorises, necrophile clones and lots of bum-sex. His collection of short stories, The 1000 Year Reich, returns to the theme of Space Marines. It's nothing that Black Library would ever publish.

When one Stanley Kubrick asked one Steven Spielberg to consider directing A.I Artificial Intelligence, said decision was based on a 90-page treatment done by Watson under Kubrick's supervision. So he had to be doing something right. Watson also sent a copy of Inquistor to Kubrick, who according to Ian, considered it for "his next movie"

He is not Aaron Dembski-Bowden. Though ADB would be stoked if he was.