"From the depths of the heart, the mouth speaketh." How much control do we consciously exercise over what we do and say? Do we choose our words or do they make us who we are? In The Great Escape, Ian Watson explores the meaning of language and its relationship to consciousness and sentience.

This common theme runs through the volume's twenty stories. For Watson, the nature of consciousness is defined largely by how our minds perceive and interact with the outside world, though Watson is concerned not just with our human minds, of course. Several stories focus on machines gaining or dealing with awareness of self and the world apart from self, while others deal with intelligences alien to our own. Readers interested in the scientific underpinnings of the concepts Watson plays with in his stories will find them explained in detail in the author's foreword. Aptly titled "Do Stories Tell Themselves?" it covers topics ranging from experiments in language to current thought on artificial intelligence.

A related theme present in many of the stories is the blending of fantasy with reality, powered only by the beliefs or thoughts of the observer. In "The Amber Room," "What Really Happened in Docklands," and "The Last Beast out of the Box," we see how easily the barrier between what is real and what is envisioned can be broken. How many times have you convinced yourself that something was true, based on your perceptions, only to cause it to be so by acting upon your belief? In "What Really Happened in Docklands," the main character's reactions to his perceptions of hostility may have caused the conflict he feared to occur. "Tulips from Amsterdam" takes a slightly stronger hypothesis, and considers how much our collective perceptions and obsessions influence the real world around us.

I found myself fascinated by Watson's speculations upon our past and future as sentient beings, upon the causes and effects of awareness, and upon the effect of aware beings upon the world around them. This book will especially appeal to those fascinated with the concepts of machine intelligence, the inner workings of the mind, or the mysteries of perception and language. In "Caucus Winter," the author explores some possibilities of quantum computers and what they could mean in a more fantastic world than our own. In "Nanculus," the implications of having machines that can make their own decisions are explored. "The China Cottage" looks at our motivations for our behavior, and how much control we have over them. "A Day Without Dad" explores the future of human sentience from a different perspective: the idea of immortality by personality graft. When a person is about to die, they take the personality, the core "self," and turn them into a rider within another person's mind. The concept is fully explored through the classic situation of a marriage under pressure, which allows Watson to show us all the burdens and the benefits that such a sharing would impart.

As a whole, I recommend the volume, but there are a few stories that left me feeling unfulfilled, as if the story had been left incomplete, leaving me unable to draw my own conclusions about the outcome. This could, however, be a failure of my own mind, seeking to interpret these tales of the workings of another's. In "The Amber Room," for example, we leave the protagonist held between dream and reality. He is unsure what is real and what is illusory, and so is the reader. Although this uncertainty was part of the feel of the story, it left me with a sense of incompleteness, like I'd missed the point. The vast majority of the stories achieve their goal, however, and construct a paradigm of reality that makes you stop and consider exactly how sentience works, and how little we understand about it.

In some stories, of course, the parts that are left untold are what make them work so memorably. The modern fantasy "What Really Happened in Docklands" uses the first person perspective to create uncertainty and to explore the nature of fantasy. The story both explicates and exemplifies a theory of generic fantasy: at first, there is a peaceful balance between groups, then the power shifts to the more sinister of the groups, and finally, the status quo is regained. It is left to the reader whether to accept the narrator's explanation of events, or to interpret the story as everyone else does in the aftermath. The reader is free because the author keeps uncertain both the story's outcome and his own view of the matter.

Although I personally disagree with some of the author's views of the mind and machine intelligence, as speculative fiction they perform admirably, raising questions that broadened my consideration of the possibilities of the human mind. "Three-Legged Dog" was a great story, exploring the effects of our obsessions. However, it taps into popular superstitions about computers -- that artificial intelligences are more than automatons -- in ways that I find disturbing. It anthropomorphizes them and treats them as if they can have effects on the outside world that could best be described as magic. But isn't it the purpose of speculative fiction to jar our minds and egos, to prod us into probing new subjects, and to challenge our long-held assumptions?

I will extend a note of caution: While excellently written, this book is certainly not meant for children. Several of the stories contain explicit scenes or descriptions of a sexual nature. "Nanculus" contains a theme, with an accompanying description, that is not only inappropriate for younger readers, but which even some adult readers may wish to avoid.

Overall, the stories collected in The Great Escape are pleasantly varied, despite their shared theme, because they are written in a variety of styles and include multiple perspectives on the nature of thought and its interaction with perception and reality. Even individual stories offer varied perspectives. In "Tulips from Amsterdam," we are taken as far as we can be with a first person narrative, and then the story is forced to go to a second narrator commenting about the first to complete the concept, and to, once again, leave us wondering whether the narrator's account is true or delusional, in his particular version of our world.

Paul Schumacher is a Copy Editor for Strange Horizons.