‘Steve Aylett is without doubt one of the most ambitious and talented writers to emerge in England in recent years. While his work echoes the best of William Burroughs, it has the mark of real originality. It’s hip, cool and eloquent.’
Michael Moorcock
‘Aylett is one of the great eccentrics of British genre fiction.’
The Guardian
‘Aylett’s prose is like poetry.’
The Independent
‘Utterly original’
SFX
‘The most original and most consciousness-altering living writer in the English language, not to mention one of the funniest.’
Alan Moore
Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967. He is the author of The Crime Studio, Atom, Bigot Hall, Fain the Sorcerer, Slaughtermatic, Rebel at the End of Time, Toxicology, Shamanspace, Smithereens and Novahead – all of which are available via the Serif Books website. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Russian and Japanese. He is a bitter man.
FAIN THE SORCERER
by Steve Aylett
Serif
London
This e-book first published 2015 by
Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA
Copyright © Steve Aylett 2006, 2015
Cover copyright © Steve Aylett 2006, 2015
Introduction copyright © Alan Moore 2006, 2015
e-book edition copyright © Serif 2015
First published in June 2006 by PS Publishing Ltd
Steve Aylett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 978 1 909150 43 0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
e-book produced by Will Dady
INTRODUCTION by Alan Moore
If we loved Steve Aylett, really loved him in the way that he deserves, a selfless love that genuinely wanted nothing save his happiness and comfort, we’d lobotomise him. Nothing complicated or too costly, just a well-judged swipe with shovel blade or flat iron when he isn’t looking ought to do the trick. This would afford him satisfaction in more ways than one. Firstly, it would confirm his previous opinion of us personally and of humanity in general, and secondly it might impair him mentally, thus furthering his career. If he could just stop the Tourette’s flood of original ideas, dilute the language so the reader only had to pause and shake their head in admiration every paragraph or so rather than every other line, this man could be a sales phenomenon, could be a franchise; it’s all just a shovel-blow away. There would be glowing twelve-year-olds lined up in Waterstones at midnight for the latest Beerlight or Accomplice saga, there’d be blockbusters, Jeremy Paxman flirting openly with Aylett during Newsnight, Lint confectionery, Hell toys. Best of all, with his critical faculties all having gone the same way as his frontal lobe, he’ll have no idea that he’s writing tepid drivel and can just enjoy himself, can ride round Tunbridge Wells in a gold dodgem car, eating cream cakes and laughing.
Clearly, though, none of us love him that much, and especially not those of us who love his work. We’d prefer, for his sake, that he could be brilliant with a large, sophisticated audience whose polish was sufficient to reflect his dazzle but, in lieu of that, we’ll settle for brilliant-and-suffering. There are few people who can suffer as amusingly, revealingly or fruitfully as Aylett can, nobody with a talent for the torment so that they can turn their horror at the ocean of stupidity around them into something at once visionary and disablingly funny. It should also be said that within the field of fantasy and science fiction there are very few creators half as dogged or uncompromising in the pursuit of their muse as is Steve Aylett, or with such good reason.
With the death of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard mourned the passing of one of the last committed writers, noting that Burroughs’ demise had left us only ‘career novelists’, the ones who had already lined up for the lucrative, blunt-spade accomplished neural surgery as mentioned earlier. These wordsmiths, spayed and tame, know where the grazing land is good and never wander past the stinging cattle-wire of audience comprehension out into the income-threatening wilderness beyond, out into the disreputable pulp-jungles of genre, into art. They know enough to hoard their fuel, dilute the energy to homeopathic doses that will not prove toxic to their audience or sales, to make one second-hand and borrowed concept last a chapter, last for a whole book. Whatever else you do, for God’s sake don’t burn twenty new ideas with every page as blazing throwaways. That just makes all the other workers on the line look bad, and anyway the constitutions of the readership are for the most part not adapted to ingest raw fire, preferring in the main its faintest after-taste, a water-memory of fire rather than the untreated magma.
Aylett, thankfully, has never met or listened to these people, and instead is gloriously unaware which side his bread is buttered. He just keeps on hurtling along, a Porky Pig express train that’s dismantling its own box cars to provide the sleepers for the tracks ahead as it roars smoking out amongst the cartoon cacti. When he first emerged in the science fiction field it was into a world of categories and labels that had no idea what to make of him. Was he a cyber-punk, a nano-punk, an Alfred Jarry pata-punk, or just somebody who’d turned up to take the piss? Was this science fiction comedy, in which case why no punning titles, why no obvious Robert Sheckley retreads, no easy referents, no ‘in the grand tradition of...’ ? Why weren’t there any plots that worked as a three-minute pitch, a three-line jacket blurb? Was he just trying to unsettle everyone?
In fact, Steve Aylett was no kind of literary punk at all. He just liked sunglasses, and that’s what had us all confused. If there are any influences to be glimpsed in the almost self-conscious and relentless onslaught of sheer novelty that is his work, they seem to be the influences of an earlier time when there was nothing punk and not much outside Dr. Who was cyber; of a period where, when it came to science fiction authors, individual voices were appreciated, and were more than that, demanded. Had he not been born, with perfect Aylett irony, in the Summer of Love, been born too late, he might have had a Michael Moorcock New Worlds as a vehicle, have had a context in amongst all of the other brilliant, mismatched oddballs. Aylett is in many ways a staunch traditionalist in that he harks back, ultimately, to the Judith Merrill days when science fiction still had a tradition of originality, before we based our writings on a calculated demographic strategy, when intellectual shock was one of the main reasons that we bothered with science fiction in the first place, and when trilogies of sorcerer-infested fantasy were the exception rather than the norm.
Which brings us to this current volume, Fain the Sorcerer, concrete proof that had Steve Aylett launched himself into the marketplace of fantasy rather than that of science fiction, then he would have been no less a marvel nor a prodigy, and he still would have frightened and bewildered us by turn. This is not comic fantasy in the restricted sense the term is used today, the knowing and post-modern slapstick with the title that lampoons a work more widely known, but is instead aggressively inventive, with a comedy that’s unrelenting, one of those transcendent satires that ends up a radiant, sublime example of the genre that it’s satirising, like Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Hunters.