Michael Moorcock
‘Aylett is one of the great eccentrics of British genre fiction.’
The Guardian
‘Aylett’s prose is like poetry.’
The Independent
‘An unstoppable master of space and time’
Asimov’s
‘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.
SMITHEREENS
Stories by Steve Aylett
Serif
London
This e-book first published 2015 by
Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA
Copyright © Steve Aylett 2010, 2015
Illustrations and pictures copyright © Steve Aylett 2010, 2015
e-book edition copyright © Serif 2015
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 37 9
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
CONTENTS
ON READING NEW BOOKS
BOSSANOVA
EVERNEMESI
WHISPER
THE RETRIAL
VOYAGE OF THE IGUANA
THE MAN WHOSE HEAD EXPANDED
GRACELAND
CABELL’S NEW SINS
GROUND WHALES
THE THINGS IN THE CITY
HOROSCOPE
FULL BLOOM
PLANET
THE BURNISHED ADVENTURES OF INJURY MOUSE
DOWNLOAD SYNDROME
STINGRAY VALENTINE
SKY
SPECTER’S WAY
‘Infinity has so much structure it has no structure.’
Karloff’s Circus
‘Don’t order the swordfish.’
The Ninth Configuration
ON READING NEW BOOKS
Enjoyment can be kept sharp by the outrage of others - sadly though, genuinely-felt outrage is as rare today as it’s ever been. I rode out of a swirling vortex on a hell-pig the other day and people just stared.
It’s a world where things created for comfort are used for denial and the dwindling comb-over of culture has led to books in which the protagonist is one or other kind of automated remnant. The inherent advantage of selling limitation is that one size is declared to fit all. Support is minimal for defiance in a world with charity toward none, malice for all and the bland decree that there can be no new ideas under the local sun.
When offered a handful of options by a manipulator, we should be careful (in turning directly away to look at the thousands of other options available) that we are not being cleverly positioned to miss the billions more in every other direction.
The truly new invents new guts for itself. An angel is unlikely to be boring or devout. The miraculous should be at least equal to the forbidden. That the two are often the same thing is one of the solitaire fucking diamonds of truth.
At its shallowest an epigram is merely a sentence which strikes a pose, the sort of prim wiseacreing that fades within decades, too flimsy to depend on. There are also stegobromides - very obvious but lightly encrypted truths which, due to people’s preference for them in their obscured form, have been left to petrify inside their own code. Then there are sayings which connect up only by ignoring a lot of facts: views with square edges, cropping off bits of reality. These are even less useful than those messiest bits of folklore that are akin to tripping over a ball of snakes.
There are proverbs which are dumb and funny - human, in other words. And finally those sayings born from the compelling notion of a sentence, word or musical note which could cataclysmically open reality to even the most evasive mind. I like the last two varieties and scrawled a bunch for the sayings of Bingo Violaine, whom the citizens of Accomplice use as a sort of epigram Pez. It’s fun to drop a profundity into a scene where screaming chimps are attacking a chef, or to bat a balloon dog into a philosophical discussion.
Imagine the horror of dropping into the world’s throat while trusting others’ declarations above the evidence of your own senses! Treason is disliked because it reveals the mechanism. In this case the mechanism is that of reality by decree - a mechanism toward which the cosmos is cryptically uncooperative. The truth doesn’t actually require our attention - it persists with or without us. It’s more indifferent to us than we can ever be to it. And when everyone dodges blame, that stuff remains in the air like radioactivity.
Imagine honest, clean regret.
In toxic times an honest eye is bound to result, for several years at least, in a sort of reverse-image horror at what’s been perpetrated. The state stripped of crimes - not even a skeleton is left. This resentment is a stain left by clear perception. You become like the philosopher who repeatedly enraged Gurdjieff by shaking him awake at three in the morning. Amid drab masses seething with optimism, any true individual almost by definition won’t be heard of - but they certainly exist and are a vivid, angular joy.
You can depart an empire by turning five corners, and ofcourse a one-track god is easily avoided. But as Eddie Gamete once said, the nightmare’s likely to renew until the day humanity rests finally in lavender and ruins, becoming one big last outbreath. Patience.
BOSSANOVA
The plastic man missed his eyes more than a human might. He had used them often, had never deferred. But exploding consoles will have their due. Nobody had doubted the authenticity of his face until that little incident.
It took a while to get himself hooked