Steve Aylett

SweetBirdOfTruth

Michael Moorcock reviews Steve Aylett's latest in the Guardian:

Curiouser and curiouser

Michael Moorcock is drawn into Steve Aylett's absurd parallel world of shamen and demons in The Velocity Gospel

Saturday June 15, 2002
The Guardian

The Velocity Gospel
Steve Aylett
131pp, Gollancz, £9.99
The most influential absurdist to emerge from 1950s science fiction was Robert Sheckley. Books such as Mindswap and Dimension of Miracles furnished Douglas Adams with an entire cabinet of borrowed curiosities.

Sheckley remains an inspiration for almost every funny SF and fantasy author writing today, but he didn't invent humorous SF. It has a long tradition, including Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (1959), Harry Harrison's Bill, The Galactic Hero (1966), Charles Platt's Garbage World (1967) and the great John Sladek's The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970). Then there is Maurice Richardson's 1950s classic Exploits of Engelbrecht, recently republished by Savoy, which is also a riot of the surreal and the absurd.

Lately, as desperately needed antidotes to nerd-friendly space fiction and inklingoid fantasy, writers such as David Britton, Rhys Hughes, Jeff VanderMeer and Tim Etchells have set their fiction in invented worlds satirically parallel to our own, inhabited by eccentric characters enthusiastically embracing irrationality and paradox.

One of the best of these new absurdists is Steve Aylett. His early mysteries were like Hammett on bad acid, in which fast-talking detectives solved metaphysical crimes and sported weapons firing philosophical concepts rather than bullets. The Crime Studio, Bigot Hall and Slaughtermatic were set in the unlikely world of Beerlight. Last year he published the wonderful Shamanspace (Codex Books), in which God was found to exist, causing various parties to seek vengeance against him.

Only an Alligator was the first in a new fantasy trilogy featuring the city of Accomplice, whose map includes the Church of Automata, the Ultimatum Restaurant and the Juice Museum. In this novel Barny Juno, who possesses a useful affinity for large animals, gets up the noses of some serious demons, saving himself with the help of his friends Edgy and Gaffer and an amiable shaman called Beltane Carom. The demons and their chief, Sweeney, are as cheerfully demented as the citizens of Accomplice, whose corrupt and greedy mayor is the only organ of government.

The Velocity Gospel is the even funnier sequel. Here Sweeney, though thoroughly thwarted by Barny, is still determined to have satisfaction, and sends his emissary Skittermite aloft to exact it. "'Because those bastards are completely covered in skin they think they can deny their insides.' The sheer architectural extravagance of demonic biology was mostly open to inspection, infernodyne veins and pulsing bile yolk fully visible through wide-flung ribs."

Meanwhile, the unwholesome Gaffer lusts after a mechanical clock and gets sucked into Accomplice's latest radical cult, The Friends of Cyril, originally invented as a public diversion by the mayor but now gathering its own reality. Their creed is contained in the Velocity Gospel, and their slogans appear all over the city: TRY OUR LAYERED MOODS and LET ROAD MURDERS YO YO. Skittermite makes unsuccessful attempts on Barny's vitals, only to be thwarted by his lions and chimps. Barny seeks shamanic advice for his love life (Chloe Lowe or Magenta Blaze?) and receives wisdom which satisfies him but confuses us.

You can't afford to skip through Aylett's idiosyncratic eloquence, and there's no easy way of further summarising the story without reducing it to something else. So much depends on tone and inference. The plot races as fast as it thickens, and reaches its existentialist resolution as Barny shacks up with Chloe. "I love it here" are his final words. We are promised more fun ahead.

Reminiscent of Ronald Firbank's The Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli or Sorrow in Sunlight, Aylett's language is often the substance, the narrative. You are lost unless you accept the logic of his characters, the sardonic rhythms of his prose. And as with Firbank, you tend to begin an Aylett feeling that you've been dropped into the annual party at the loony bin, but after a few pages his weirdly angled vision takes you over.

By the end of the book it all seems perfectly logical, while the world around you is definitely askew. This is his genius - if you give him your time, he'll return you solid value, an enjoyable rollercoaster ride. But you'll never be entirely sure of what you've heard or where you've been.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,6000,737521,00.html

http://www.steveaylett.com