{"id":34826,"date":"2026-04-24T08:47:19","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T06:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/?p=34826"},"modified":"2026-04-24T08:47:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T06:47:42","slug":"dont-buy-flowers-buy-books-a-farewell-to-ian-watson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/en\/dont-buy-flowers-buy-books-a-farewell-to-ian-watson\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDon\u2019t buy flowers\u2014buy books\u201d: a farewell to Ian Watson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ian Watson delivering his speech at the UPC Miquel Barcel\u00f3 Science Fiction Prize, 17 September 2025. \/ Photograph by the author<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a style=\"display: inline-block;\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/deed.en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license noopener noreferrer\">License Creative Commons <img decoding=\"async\" style=\"height: 22px!important; margin-left: 3px; vertical-align: text-bottom;\" src=\"https:\/\/mirrors.creativecommons.org\/presskit\/icons\/by.svg?ref=chooser-v1\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"height: 22px!important; margin-left: 3px; vertical-align: text-bottom;\" src=\"https:\/\/mirrors.creativecommons.org\/presskit\/icons\/nc.svg?ref=chooser-v1\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"height: 22px!important; margin-left: 3px; vertical-align: text-bottom;\" src=\"https:\/\/mirrors.creativecommons.org\/presskit\/icons\/nd.svg?ref=chooser-v1\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-15012\" src=\"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Therfer-web-color-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"70\" height=\"70\" \/><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/therfer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Antoni Hern\u00e1ndez-Fern\u00e1ndez<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On 13 April 2026\u2014just ten days before Sant Jordi, Catalonia\u2019s day of books, roses and lovers\u2014the worlds of science fiction and literature lost one of their most brilliant, daring and original minds. <strong>Ian Watson<\/strong>, the British master who chose Gij\u00f3n as his home for the last fifteen years of his life, died at the age of 82. He was far more than a prolific genre writer: he was an anthropologist of possible worlds, an explorer of the frontiers of the mind, language and our relationship with technology.<\/p>\n<p>I had the good fortune to meet him last year at the ceremony for the UPC Miquel Barcel\u00f3 Science Fiction Prize. Watson was an extraordinary writer who used science fiction to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are. He was also a man of infectious vitality and humour, deeply in love with life, science and literature. In place of a conventional farewell, his family shared his final\u2014and characteristically brilliant\u2014wish: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lne.es\/gijon\/2026\/04\/13\/ultima-peticion-escritor-ian-watson-129045804.html\">A expreso deseo del fallecido: no compren flores,\u00a0<\/a> compren libros (At his express request: don\u2019t buy flowers\u2014buy books).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The Embedding<\/em><\/strong><strong> and the limits of language<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As a physicist and linguist, I feel almost compelled to return to his first novel, <strong><em>The Embedding<\/em><\/strong> (1973). But the recommendation is universal. It is a masterpiece that established him at once and which, in our digital age, feels more relevant than ever. Few novels have explored with such clarity how the structure of language shapes the very fabric of reality.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_34727\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-34727\" style=\"width: 196px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-34727\" src=\"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/portada-omnium-023-incrustados-196x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/portada-omnium-023-incrustados-196x300.jpg 196w, https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/portada-omnium-023-incrustados.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 196px) 100vw, 196px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-34727\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cover of The Embedding by Ian Watson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The narrative weaves together three strands with remarkable precision. First, we encounter Chris Sole, a linguist working in a British hospital, engaged in an experiment as radical as it is ethically troubling: he raises a group of orphaned children in isolation, teaching them an artificially constructed, highly complex language in an attempt to reshape their cognitive perception of the world. Meanwhile, his former colleague and friend Pierre, an anthropologist, is deep in the Amazon studying the Xemahoas\u2014an isolated tribe on the brink of extinction. Through a psychedelic fungus, the Xemahoas access a second, sacred language that allows them to commune with the essence of reality itself.<\/p>\n<p>The novel ultimately expands into the cosmic with the arrival of the Spthra, an alien species that travels not in search of resources, but of languages. Their aim is to collect and overlay all forms of communication in the universe in order to decipher the underlying code of reality\u2014and perhaps escape it. It is, quite simply, irresistible for anyone drawn to the mysteries of language.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Screens, algorithms and the robot child: Watson\u2019s technological legacy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Read today, <em>The Embedding<\/em> reveals itself as an unsettlingly prescient metaphor. Sole\u2019s experiment\u2014echoing the behaviourist models of B. F. Skinner\u2014resonates strongly with current debates about technology in education and the so-called addiction to screens. Just as those children were shaped by an artificial language that altered their cognition and distanced them from lived human experience, we too now find ourselves \u201cembedded\u201d within the ecosystems engineered by big tech: in human\u2013machine hybridity, in the revival\u2014one might say\u2014of Ortega\u2019s ontological centaur.<\/p>\n<p>Social media and artificial intelligence algorithms have become the new language imposed upon us. Our brains\u2014and especially those of younger generations who have known nothing else\u2014are being retrained under the regime of instant dopamine, infinite scrolling and constant notifications. We are participants, largely passive, in a vast global experiment in cognitive embedding, where attention\u2014and, more troublingly, perception itself\u2014has been quietly reprogrammed by codes we barely understand. And no Spthra are coming to rescue us.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Source:\u00a0<strong>educational EVIDENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Rights:\u00a0<strong>Creative Commons<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 13 April 2026\u2014just ten days before Sant Jordi, Catalonia\u2019s day of books, roses and lovers\u2014the worlds of science fiction and literature lost one of their most brilliant, daring and original minds. Ian Watson, the British master who chose Gij\u00f3n as his home for the last fifteen years of his life, died at the age of 82.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":34722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[213],"tags":[4418,4417],"class_list":["post-34826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cover","tag-ian-watson","tag-the-embedding"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u201cDon\u2019t buy flowers\u2014buy books\u201d: a farewell to Ian Watson - Educational Evidence<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On 13 April 2026\u2014just ten days before Sant Jordi, Catalonia\u2019s day of books, roses and lovers\u2014the worlds of science fiction and literature lost one of their most brilliant, daring and original minds. 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