Thursday, 25th of March, 2004

Wow. Steve Aylett is an evil genius, and he’s been here under my nose all along. How did I miss him until recently? The charming Thomas Marchbank @ Allen & Unwin told me I’d like him, and how right he was! I have a feeling nothing else will quite live up to Slaughtermatic, although I’m going to dive into the short stories of Toxicology soon, so we’ll see! I’ve since read The Crime Studio and Atom as well, both of which were fun, but Slaughtermatic is something else again. The rapid-fire riffs on Borgesian themes, the insanely surreal weaponry, the warped English take on American crime fiction (Aylett’s biography claims that “if he were any more English he’d be dead”), the cyberpunk aesthetic… it’s all too much. Just about every page has some throwaway line that could have an entire comic sf novel made out of it; fascinating characters are created and then disposed of; Aylett creates a temporal paradox with charming disregard for logic, except that the characters have deep philosophical discussions about it (not to mention discussing the economics of robbing a bank while doing so… and on it goes).
It’s postmodernism without the stupid bits. It’s a cyberpunk Terry Pratchett with all dials turned up to 11 - indeed it revels in just that kind of mixed metaphor, which it takes so seriously that you’re swept along in its upside-down and inside-out logic.

Oh. You want to know something about the book? Goodness, how demanding! Well, um, Beerlight is this city where basically all the residents are criminals (or want to be - it’s sortof like a criminals’ Hollywood). The worst crims are the cops, of course. (All the Ayletts I’ve read so far are Beerlight books.)
Dante Cubit stages a bank heist, using time travel to get out before the alarms go off. It turns out his real reason for robbing the bank is to get hold of a lost book by Eddie Gamete, and many of Slaughtermatic’s joys revolve around the potted descriptions of Gamete’s fiction: “Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort…”
Of Gamete, we are told: “The thinking man’s Camus, he achieved in his first draft what others attained by years of overwriting.”
“In Trash Tango the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo”. Whereas The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel (the book Dante seeks) is a kind of fractal novel which apparently no person can read and live. Gamete is surely the greatest fictional author since Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, but Aylett is too clever not to play on Borges‘ fake fictions and Georges Perec’s playful surreality while he’s at it.

I should’ve known that Paul di Filippo was right when I read his review of this ages ago, but I just noted Aylett’s name down and forgot about it. I’m so glad I finally picked this one up at Berkelows‘ big sale (whenever it was…) You just have to read this. You really have no choice.

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