Aylett, Steve 1967-

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Aylett, Steve 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born 1967, in Bromley, South London, England. Education: Left school at age seventeen.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—MBA Literary Agents Ltd., 62 Grafton Way, London W1P 5LD, England.

CAREER:

Writer, c. 1994—. Also worked in a book warehouse and in trade and law publishing. Also toured in the "Shroud" show, as a silent impersonator of the Shroud of Turin.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Philip K. Dick Award finalist, 1998, for Slaughtermatic; Jack Trevor Story Prize, 2006.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Crime Studio (novel), Serif (London, England), 1994, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2001.

Bigot Hall: A Gothic Childhood (novel), Serif (London, England), 1995.

Slaughtermatic (novel), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1998.

Toxicology (short stories), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1999.

The Inflatable Volunteer (novel), Orion (London, England), 1999.

Atom (novel), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2000.

Only an Alligator: Accomplice 1 (novel), Orion (London, England), 2001.

Shamanspace, Codex Books (Hove, England), 2001.

The Velocity Gospel: Accomplice 2 (novel), Orion (London, England), 2002.

Dummyland: Accomplice 3 (novel), Orion (London, England), 2002.

Karloff's Circus: Accomplice 4 (novel), Orion (London, England), 2004.

Lint (novel), Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2005.

(Editor) And Your Point Is?, Raw Dog Screaming Press (Hyattsville, MD), 2006.

Fain the Sorcerer, PS Publishing (Hornsea, East Yorkshire, England), 2006.

Also contributor of stories to anthologies, including Disco Biscuits. Aylett was recorded reading excerpts from Toxicology, Atom, The Inflatable Volunteer, Bigot Hall, and Only an Alligator for a CD titled Staring Is Its Own Reward. Also author of Tao Te Jinx. Aylett's work has been translated into Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Japanese, German, Russian, and Greek.

SIDELIGHTS:

Steve Aylett is an English writer who is known for his quirky, unsettling fiction, which includes both novels and short stories. His first book, The CrimeStudio, is an episodic novel that relates disturbing events in Beerlight, a dangerous, futuristic metropolis replete with unlikely criminals. The Crime Studio won praise from David V. Barrett, writing in New Statesman & Society, for its "sharpness" and "cohesion." Several years after its British publication, The Crime Studio was published in the United States. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Aylett presents "a world devoid of morality and consequence" with "biting sarcasm and eloquent wit." For James Sallis, reviewing the work in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Aylett's noir futuristic glimpse was a "kind of floor plan for the ultimate America, where individualism has been taken to the limits, bulletproof underwear is openly on sale, and paranoia is regarded not as mental aberration but as standard urban equipment."

Aylett's second novel, Bigot Hall: A Gothic Childhood, was acknowledged by Barrett as "gloriously appalling." Bigot Hall exposes the tension, violence, and sexuality of seemingly mundane domestic life, and the novel's host of oddball characters include an incestuous brother and sister, a mother who cooks mysterious meals, a father who regularly dispenses banal insights, and a twisted, bothersome uncle. Speaking with Richard Marshall of 3AM Magazine, Aylett further described the quirkiness of this novel which, though not published in the United States, has nonetheless become a minor cult classic here: "[Bigot Hall is] a gothic parody of this bunch of English people living in this smashed up manor house, with moose heads on the wall salivating and speaking and strange things like that. Fungal spores growing into monks. And half the building is closed off because it's full of nuns in welding masks and no one goes in there because of these nuns doing all the welding."

Aylett followed Bigot Hall with the novel Slaughtermatic, in which he returns to Beerlight, the setting of the earlier The Crime Studio, to chronicle a wrongheaded burglary and the chaos that ensues. In Slaughtermatic, bank robber Dante Cubit and his pill-popping companion, the Entropy Kid, conduct a heist in which Cubit, who masterminded the ultimately bungled caper, must resort to time travel as a means of avoiding capture. This time-travel escapade in turn leads to the duplication of Cubit, and this event results in still further complications, including the eventual necessity of destroying Cubit's second self. Plans go further awry, however, when the duplicate Cubit dodges death and triggers a chase that involves a pair of racist police officers, a hired assassin, a conniving attorney, and Cubit's gun-wielding lover, Rosa Control. A critic at Complete Review claimed that Slaughtermatic "doesn't quite fit together as a novel," and a Kirkus Reviews critic described the novel as "a baffling exercise in virtual reality storytelling." The Complete Review critic conceded, however, that the novel is nonetheless "a hell of a ride, and worthwhile for all that," and even the Kirkus Reviews critic summarized the story as "droll, convoluted gamesmanship." John Mort, meanwhile, regarded Slaughtermatic, in his Booklist assessment, as "a mockery of a novel." But Michael Porter wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Slaughtermatic constitutes a "hyperkinetically violent, hilarious time-traveling crime caper." Porter added, "While the body count is high, the tone is anything but grim, thanks to Aylett's wickedly funny commentary." Slaughtermatic received attention as a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998. Aylett also returns to his fictional locale of Beerlight in the novel Atom.

Among Aylett's other publications is Toxicology, a collection of short stories in a range of genres and experimental forms. The volume includes "If Armstrong Was Interesting," which lists various antics—donning Mickey Mouse ears, confessing to a crime—that astronaut Neil Armstrong might have initiated while becoming the first human being to step onto the surface of the moon, and "Gigantic," wherein mankind's heinous deeds—including the nuclear bombings of Japan—are punished by a storm in which corpses fall to earth like drops of rain. Daniel Reitz, writing in the New York Times Book Review, declared that Aylett showed himself guilty of "preening cleverness" with Toxicology. In addition, Reitz contended that "the banality of these stories defeats any points [Aylett] is trying to make."

Aylett once told CA: "It's less insulting to the reader to say something in a few words, like ‘Progress accelerates downhill,’ rather than spend an entire book saying that. I've seen Toxicology described as a liquid concentrate, which you're not supposed to drink without dilution, which is nice. Though I thought there were a few lighter stories in there too. I still just write the kind of books I'd like to read, that I'd like to find out there, and luckily enough people share that taste to be into them.

"Placing your head inside the reaction out there will certainly rot your brain, it's a displacement of energy. Stay in your own body, you see? People may read one of my things and think it's all a particular way, for good or ill. But there's Slaughtermatic, which is fairly conventional old-time satire which nobody else does these days. Then there's The Inflatable Volunteer, which has no satire and is this big splurge of funny poetics. And later there's stuff that's unlike any of that because I've hardly started yet. So I have to disregard all this. My head stays here."

Aylett presents a fictional biography in his 2005 work, Lint, creating an antagonist reminiscent of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Aylett's protagonist is Jeff Lint, who, like Dick, was born in Chicago in 1928. His early career was in the pulp magazines, such as Amazing Stories, and then he spent much of his career manufacturing formula science fiction books and working in every genre one could think of, from short stories to comics. Carl Hays, writing in Booklist, concluded: "Readers with the taste for offbeat humor of the Douglas Adams, genre-spoofing variety should savor Aylett's latest." Similar praise came from a Publishers Weekly contributor who termed the book a "laugh-out-loud (mock) biography." Ed Parks, reviewing from Village Voice, was less impressed, however, feeling this faux biography fell short of being "mock comic"; instead, it merely has the "wobbly energy of a first draft." Rick Kleffel, writing for Agony Magazine, had a more positive assessment of Lint, concluding that it "is clearly the work of a mind in the advanced stages of both creative genius and insanity." For Kleffel, Lint "is every bit as brilliant, as hilarious, as pithy and as psychedelic as anything [Aylett] describes as being written by Lint."

Aylett further noted for CA: "I certainly don't think in words. I'm not sure that anyone does, really. Does anyone really think in sentences, like in films when you see someone thinking and you hear a voice-over? I don't anyway. I see stuff visually, as shapes, colours, textures and mechanisms sort of hanging there in space. If there's a hole in someone's argument I visually see a hole in it, in the armature and mass of the thing. Although it may take time to translate it all back into words and express them. And in writing I'll see the shape and colour of a sentence before I know what the words are in it. I'll see the shape of a whole book that way before it's written, and so far, the books have all ended up the way I saw them originally.

"I often feel people don't see past all the fireworks to what I'm talking about. Maybe sometime I'll do something with all the fireworks stripped out, no jokes, for the hard-of-reading—so they'll see what's always been there from the beginning.

"For postmodernist bullshit, the law is streets ahead. Anyone who's sat in on an adversarial court case, seen the mechanisms of the law, the subjectivity, the basic disengagement from fact, truth thrown to the wind, it really is like being in the mouth of madness. The person who's in the right might win the case, but not because he's in the right—just for other, quite surreally disassociated reasons. Reality gets the kiss-off at the start. The lawyer Harpoon Specter is great to write, he's a monster who operates in that totally unanchored, mutable alternate dimension. He says right at the start of The Crime Studio, ‘The law is where reality goes to die’—he knows this."