So how are you finding life in the 21st century?
It’s f**k-awful so far. People seem to getting stupider and more easily led. There’s less genuine desire for new ideas, while simultaneously there’s a louder than ever false cry for new ideas. It’s very much like the eighties, only more so – a sort of Hyper-Eighties. But it’s been like this since the late-90s, so maybe it’ll thaw out and colour up again soon, the way these cycles go around. I’ve just never seen the point in having this part of the cycle at all, the bland wasteland part.
For those that have been unlucky enough not to have read your work, how would you describe your writing style? Has it changed a lot since you first put pen to paper?
It’s satire with quite high-resolution surreal stuff. It can be weird and poetic, and is fairly dense. And it’s funny, which I always forget. I’ve described Jeff Lint’s stuff as being ‘pointillist’, in that every sentence comes directly at you – each point is the head of a thread which continues away behind the page, so that if you turned the page sideways you’d see all these information threads streaming off – not into infinity but quite a long way. That’s what I try to do. It’s just a way of packing a lot of information into a book, in microdots. This is the one thing I have in common with the old-time cyberpunk writers, who used to measure their kudos on how much information they could pack into the smallest space.
From I think ATOM onwards I worked out how to make this look more casual by varying the tone and having some stuff that’s just a laugh, so you’re not wading through molasses. You don’t necessarily know that all this stuff is in there. It’s not to everyone’s taste, anyway. And the style will change a bit later, assuming I continue.
Did you always want to be a writer?
When I was very young I was into dinosaurs and I think I wanted to run the Natural History Museum or do something dinosaur-related, even though they were already dead and beyond hope at that point. I wrote stuff too, but then at around ten I got into the idea of writing as a proper thing. Now I think I would have been happier as a zoologist or an ichthyologist, something like that, studying dolphins.
What are your influences?
Very early influences were Voltaire, JP Donleavy, the Beats, a lot of poetry – but mainly satirists of the old kind like Voltaire and Swift, and maybe some American satirists/essayists like Twain, Mencken, Ingersoll and Bierce. People who are mostly reasonable and human, and sort of stand out because of it. I also like Jack Vance, Greg Egan, Dostoevsky, Octavia Butler, Brautigan, Moorcock and a lot of others I can never remember when asked. In addition to satirists, cyberpunks and so on, I like writers who are able to do things I could never do but wish I could. I’m a big fan of Billy Childish, who’s one of the best writers alive. Also I could never have written LITTLE, BIG by John Crowley, or stuff by Banana Yoshimoto, Samantha Power, Ferris Gilli.
Among newer writers I like Anna Tambour’s collection MONTERRA’S DELICIOSA & OTHER TALES &, which delivered what Kelly Link’s STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN was said to but didn’t for me. Also D. Harlan Wilson, Joe Hill, Colette Phair, Geoffrey Maloney. These aren’t influences, they’re just newer things that I’ve liked lately. Grant Morrison and Alan Moore turn out to be very good non-graphic fiction writers (though very different from eachother). And Thomas Ligotti is very funny, in a similar way to Lovecraft.
What attracts you to satire? Why do you think people get confused about what qualifies as satire?
I like the shapes of the mechanisms in it, and that they can be used for a sort of audacious honesty. Good satire uses people’s own flawed or dishonest arguments against them by accelerating the argument into a sort of mind bomb. But it does unfortunately depend upon the receiver having a well-functioning mind and at least a scrap of honesty in there somewhere, so it doesn’t always work.
People mis-define satire because for a long time there’s been so much lame stuff around calling itself satire – stuff that’s just sarcasm, impersonation and commentary mixed together. Surprisingly there’s been some good actual satire emerging on US television, like Stephen Colbert at his best. And here and there on the web. The web has recently taken over the stuff that newspapers and magazines stopped doing a quarter-century ago – satire and investigative journalism.
I’ve also read that you’re ’synaesthetic’, can you describe what that’s like in terms of how you view things? Can it be learnt or developed at all?
It’s not as strange or unusual as it’s made out to be - it’s just a bit of a crossover of different senses. So I see music, taste some colours and so on. I think the music thing is very common, but people tell themselves that that isn’t what’s happening. Anyone who really gets into music will see colours and images with it, but some people are more conscious of it than others. The other stuff is less common, and it’s all fairly useless. It’s completely useless at a practical level to feel that a certain high-pitched green colour is fizzy or a deep purple has a humming sound and tastes of sweet smoke or whatever. The only place it can be used is in being able to instantly ’see’ the hole in a person’s argument without having to think about it, because an argument or philosophy can present as a sort of 3-D schematic or sculpture - and that sort of thing only leads to getting beaten up and running from screaming mobs and so on. And if I’m working on faulty or incomplete information I’ll get it wrong anyway – the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ thing. I’ll just get it wrong instantly, that’s all.
There are other downsides to the colour and shape side of things, in that some environments can come across as oppressively hyper-crappy. It can be instantly depressing. For instance, the architecture throughout London is for some reason designed to emulate corpses which are rotted almost to dust. Ribs sticking out of powder. The city is one big death-sigh, it visually has that sound. The only building with any energy is that one that looks like a pinecone (the Gherkin). Architecture which is dead-designed will try to sort of cling on by sucking energy out of its inhabitants, but energetic natural-form architecture will actually give some energy. At the very least it’s relaxed.
Only a few very general things are common to all synaesthetes, as far as I know - most will get colours toward yellow for higher notes for example, and/or get higher notes from colours toward yellow. But early life associations also get mixed in, so it doesn’t necessarily all communicate the same for one synaesthete as it would for another. The same things don’t signify the same stuff to all. So it’s not a reliable communication system. It’s just a trip, basically, good or bad.
You’ve written a few comics too - feel free to name-check them - how does it compare to writing ’standard’ stories?
I did THE CATERER comic, which was a spin-off from my book LINT. So many people wanted to find copies of the comic I invented for that book, I ended up just making one. People seem to love that thing. I wrote an issue of Alan Moore’s TOM STRONG comic (issue 27). That was great fun, and it was interesting seeing how it came back - it looked almost exactly how I had imagined it. The comic project closest to my heart is THE NERVE, which I wrote in 2001 and was about the stuff that would happen later, ie. what’s happening now. I sent it to about 150 different comic companies, big and small, and received absolutely no reply from any of them. Not a word.
Matthew Petz has done some panels and character pics which you can see (here) and ( here…)
As you can see, Spiderman isn’t in it, so no-one’s interested.
As regards the main difference from ‘normal’ writing, it’s the fact that you’re obviously describing something that the artist will have to draw. You have to make it very clear (preferably in only a few words) what the panel looks like so the artist gets a flash-up image of what’s needed - he or she should be able to ’see’ it. The story-telling element in a comic is often quite compressed, but that’s how I write anyway so that’s fine.
Any plans to write more comics?
I’d like to, but the comic industry is basically impenetrable. There’s a thing I’ve done for ARTHUR magazine’s ‘mimeo’ line, called THE PROMISSORY. It’s a B&W thing with a load of pigs in it, because I also drew the thing and pigs are the only figures I can draw repeatedly with a sure hand. Arthur’s mimeo pamphlets are in the tradition of those old mimeo small press mags from the 50s and 60s. My one is slightly comic-like but it keeps with the mimeo tradition by looking like the work of an imploding obsessive of some kind. It’s a very odd document and very retro. It’s strange.
If you could take an established comic property/character and do your own thing with it, which would it be and what would you do differently?
There’s an obscure Marvel villain called Madcap who’s been around since the 70s and who I think most recently turned up in Hell Rider. He’d be good to finally do something interesting with in his own comic. He’s ripe for a Grant Morrison sort of treatment. There are things they set up in the character and powers etc, that they’ve never begun to explore properly.
You’ve got a new novel coming out called ‘Fain the Sorcerer’, what’s the story all about?
FAIN THE SORCERER is a sort of accelerated fairy tale involving the ‘three wishes’ scenario and how to get around it. The main character becomes a sorcerer and everything gradually gets more and more lush and complicated. It looked something like Cabell’s JURGEN with some Voltairian satire thrown in, and somehow what came out the other end is something like one of Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth‘ books. But I’m a big Vance fan so I don’t mind. It’s a little novella published by PS. I also did the cover artwork. Alan Moore did the intro for it and we’ve both signed a load of them.
What have you got against mimes?
Well, they’re obviously calling attention themselves, and simultaneously being spooky and obscure, while clearly expecting some reaction from onlookers. The combination of all these things leads me to conclude that they want to be destroyed.
Do you make a conscious decision about what kind of story you want to write, or is the process less defined? For instance, if you see a news story/have a weird dream… ?
It’s not exactly a conscious decision of making a ‘plan’ to write a certain kind of book and carry it out like a strategy. I’ll get an idea for a book or story more or less delivered in one go, and during those first few seconds or minutes more expansion of the book will occur than at any time later. (I think that’s the case with a lot of writers.) It’s like uncompressing a zip file or something. All the architecture, atmosphere, flavour and colours of the thing will show up very quickly. Then it’s just a case of writing the book that creates that - sort of filling in the details. I don’t get any story ideas from dreams. I’ll sometimes get little details like specific sentences from dreams, but most dream stuff looks rubbish in the light of day.
Do you have any other books in the pipeline?
After FAIN THE SORCERER, there’s a little book of Lint ephemera called AND YOUR POINT IS? After that, there are about a dozen books that have shown up in the way I described earlier – basically they’re the second, more interesting half of my writing career, a bit different - but I’m generally a bit pissed off at the moment and wondering whether to bother with any of it, whether to carry on. I’m not obliged to transcribe these things. So those are all in a holding pattern. I’d have to get the final Beerlight book out of the way before I could start on those, anyway – it’s like an airbubble that needs clearing. I am working on that Beerlight book while I decide what to do. It’s quite strange to be back there. I forgot how well I know my way around. The Beerlight thing is placed well in that there’s an easy reach from there into dumbness one way and profundity in another. Chronologically the new one is set a few years after SLAUGHTERMATIC, and things have got a lot worse.
There seems to be a book-based movie adaptation coming out every other week, what’s the current situation with your novels?
There’s a Crime Studio/Beerlight TV series idea floating around LA at the moment, but that’s all, as far as I know. It’s not healthy to hold your breath in anticipation of those things.
Finally, any words of wisdom you’d like to share?
As you get older it can be surprising how much is survivable, but whether it’s worth surviving is still fairly doubtful.
Fain the Sorceror is out now, and for more information visit ( www.steveaylett.com)
Mo Ali was born in a haunted hospital and has exceeded all expectations and kept breathing.
A digital artist, poet and writer, he needs to find some paid work before the inevitable apocalypse. To make matters worse he lives in Berkshire.