Context /.top-menu When­ever I find my will to live be­com­ing too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll Peter Watts is an awk­ward hy­brid of bi­ol­o­gist, sci­ence-fic­tion au­thor, and (ac­cord­ing to the US De­part­ment of Home­land Se­cu­rity) con­victed felon/tew­wow­ist. In ad­di­tion to a num­ber of ac­co­lades for sci­ence fic­tion, he has won minor awards in fields as di­verse as ma­rine mam­mal re­search and video doc­u­men­tary. None of these have gone to his head since they never in­volved a lot of cash. He spent ten years get­ting a bunch of de­grees in the eco­phys­i­ol­ogy of ma­rine mam­mals and an­other ten try­ing to make a liv­ing on those qual­i­fi­ca­tions with­out be­com­ing a whore for spe­cial-in­ter­est groups. This proved some­what tougher than it looked; through­out the nineties he was paid by the an­i­mal wel­fare mov...