Steve Aylett (born 1967 in Bromley, United Kingdom) is an English author of satire science fiction, fantasy, and slipstream genre. According to the critic Bill Ectric, "much of Aylett’s work combines the bawdy, action-oriented style of Voltaire with the sedentary, faux cultivated style of Peacock."
Although Aylett is best known for his novels, and for his transmedial metafiction Lint, he has also created comics, stand-up, performance, music, movies, and art, often working in appropriative and other avant-garde modes. Aylett is also one of the few UK authors associated with the largely US-based bizarro fiction literary movement.
Writing
Beerlight
Aylett's Beerlight series includes the novels
The Crime Studio (1994),
Slaughtermatic (1997),
Atom (2000) and
Novahead (2011), as well as shorter fiction such as "The Siri Gun" (1998) and "Shifa" (1999). The setting of these works has been described as a "cyber-noir vision of a near-future metropolis with a comic-book aesthetic"
and as "a crime-ridden urban-noir hell inhabited by a menagerie of grotesque, amoral characters and surreal, mind-bending technology."
Stylistically, the Beerlight series "marries the cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, William S. Burroughs’ talent for utterly weird but comprehensible description, and the hardboiled stylings of Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard."
Accomplice
Only an Alligator (2001),
The Velocity Gospel (2002),
Dummyland (2002), and
Karloff's Circus (2004) are set in Accomplice, a suburb on a tropical peninsula in a perhaps nuclear-blasted future, underneath which live demons; Aylett says he is in the tradition of "real satirists" such as
Voltaire,
Jonathan Swift and
Mark Twain.
The four books are collected in
The Complete Accomplice (2010).
Jeff Lint
Lint (2005) is a satirical,
Zelig-like biography of an imaginary author. The book traces Jeff Lint's career through thinly disguised satires on a number of well-known writers from the late 20th century, including Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson and
Ken Kesey. As Paul Di Filippo remarks, Jeff Lint's work is sometimes not dissimilar to Aylett's.
Jeff Lint is also a transmedial creation, incorporating a comic,
The Caterer #3 (2008), purportedly written by Jeff Lint; a spoof Wikipedia page;
a spoof collection of academic essays on Lint's work,
And Your Point Is? (2014); and a mockumentary
Lint: The Movie (2011), which features reminisces by "[Alan Moore]],
Stewart Lee,
Robin Ince,
Mikey Georgeson,
Josie Long, D. Harlan Wilson, Bill Ectric, and
Jeff VanderMeer on Lint’s outrageous and irritating career."
Comic books
Aylett has also written for
comics, most notably the Jeff Lint title
The Caterer (2008). Other projects include #27 of
Tom Strong (2004),
The Promissory for
Arthur magazine’s "mimeo" line (2007),
Get That Thing Away From Me (2014), and
Johnny Viable, which appeared in
Alan Moore print magazine
Dodgem Logic and was collected and expanded as the standalone
Johnny Viable & His Terse Friends (2014). In 2021-22 Aylett's 3-part comic
Hyperthick was published by Floating World Comics; Alan Moore described it as "a new dimension of poetic genius" and Grant Morrison said, "It's astonishing - like being riot-hosed with language, ideas and imagery!" In late 2022 Aylett produced the
Aylett Tarot, and in 2023 another card deck called
The Trickster Brick, which featured creativity prompts. Both were available through Etsy.
Awards
Slaughtermatic was shortlisted for the 1998 Philip K. Dick Award.
Aylett was the recipient of the 2006 Jack Trevor Story Award.
Personal life
Aylett left school at the age of seventeen and worked in a book warehouse, and later in law publishing. A
synesthesia, Aylett claims to have books appear in his brain in one visual "glob" that looks like a piece of gum.
[Rick Klaw, "A Glob of Multicolored Chiming Vibrational Bubble Gum: An Interview with Steve Aylett" , Fantastic Metropolis (19 February 2005)] Aylett also has Asperger syndrome.
Bibliography
Novels
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Fain the Sorcerer - 2012
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Tao Te Jinx - 2023
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The Book Lovers - 2024
Short fiction
Other works
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The Caterer. Spoof Pearl Comics reprint. 2008.
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Johnny Viable and His Terse Friends. Floating World Comics. 2014.
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Notes
External links
Interviews
Music and Audio
