by Zack Wentz
Right now you're reading this magazine we call Modern Fix. That's granted and that's good and actually that's great for us, but now you have no excuse. You have no excuse because now that you've given away the fact you know how to read it means there are some other things you should be reading, and one of those things you should be reading is a book by Steve Aylett. Steveis the author of Slaughtermatic, a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, and a contributor to Arthur.

In America the limiting of some authors to being marketed as "sci-fi" has been really depressing, like with some truly great genre-bending writers such as Barry N. Malzberg, Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison. Some other authors who use elements of sci-fi have been able to avoid it by being more literary, like Kurt Vonnegut, Steve Erickson and Kathy Acker. Have you had trouble with being pigeonholed in the UK?
I am pigeonholed, but depending on who you ask, they have different ideas of where. Some think it's SF, or fantasy, or occasionally crime, or "literature". Or the "Beat" or "Slipstream" section sometimes, if they have that. The one common thing is that there apparently has to be a category. And different people have read different stuff, books which have different levels of "making a serious point", from the extremes of Shamanspace to the jokey Inflatable Volunteer. So you'll see me described in totally contradictory ways, and there's a point where I have to disengage from all that and remember to just get back to it, which is what I've done.

I get a kind of experimental post-punk vibe from your stuff. Poetic and complex, but jagged and angular.
Yeah, it's like, having dealt with that bit in that sentence, move on to another matter in the next line even if it goes off at a totally different angle, or seems to start at a different place. And credit the reader with the wit to follow and to see the connection, or to put their brain at a height where the connection is visible. In song lyrics I like some of the less watered-down people like Mark E. Smith of The Fall. He's poetic and also great because you mis-hear him. He said something in a song, that sounded like "You gave me the treat too soon" - said very ominously. He didn't actually say that, so it was mine. So I gave the line to a character.

You've stretched a lot of characters, ideas and settings over the course of several books. Would you say this is because you produce shorter books somewhat rapidly and still have things you'd like to re-explore, or you set out with the idea of using things repeatedly over time in a serial fashion?
I don't write quickly - people just don't pay attention and when they look back again I happen to have finished another book. As for taking characters through a few books, that's certainly the case with Beerlight. For some reason when I started writing that stuff, I knew what was going to happen there over a period of about thirty years. So naturally some of the same characters show up. Chronologically, The Crime Studio is early halcyon days, Atom is a bit later, and Slaughtermatic happens a few years after that (though they weren't written/published in that order). Some of the Beerlight stories in Toxicology occur around the same time as The Crime Studio. There's a fourth proper Beerlight book which will occur ten years after Slaughtermatic. Beerlight is basically Baltimore/Chicago/New York, the way they'll go, irrespective of which politics prevail. Any philosophy can be bent to justify evil, and most human beings who attain positions of leverage will use anything they can find.

Your writing is very much present and future minded. Do you feel very tied in to culture, like there is still a vital position for literature?
I don't feel tied to culture or fashion. When I was much younger I always felt the childish need to do the opposite of whatever was fashionable, so whenever the music I was into became fashionable I would feel obliged to drop it. But these days I'm not affected by it one way or the other. In terms of my writing, I write what I want, and the stuff will be picked up properly by people "out there" in ten or fifteen years time if people are still around - too late to help me financially of course but there it is. For me it's the only thing that makes me happy, really. And sex, obviously. And sleep.

Not all of your books are readily available in the U.S. yet. I'm really curious about your Accomplice books. Can you tell us more about these? Any plans for getting them, or any of your other "import only" books out over here?
As for the Accomplice "quadrilogy" or whatever, Orion own the American rights to it, so anyone who wants to publish the Accomplice books in the US should approach probably Simon Spanton at Orion in London. They're certainly making no effort to sell it. Orion were going to open an American branch, you see, but never did. So the Accomplice US rights are just languishing with Orion. There are hundreds of dumb things like that, stopping things from happening. I think the idea is that I kill myself in fucking despair, then there'll be the requisite publicity and things will pick up. I may well do that, but not for those reasons. The Accomplice books starting with Only an Alligator, are set in a weird sort of tropical suburb by the sea, and its citizens are regularly drained of their blood by the authorities. The hero is a guy who cares for incredibly dangerous animals such as lions, and he's baffled as to why everyone's scared of them. The town has a demonic subway underneath it called the creepchannel, which demons use to travel from one nightmare to another. The human beings are way worse than the demons, though. It's the funniest and, I think, most satirical stuff I've done, but is apparently too weird for a lot of people.

You're something of a satirist, and parts of your work are often laugh out loud hilarious. At the same time you seem deadly serious. It isn't a bittersweet, purging kind of laughter. More along the lines of the way Swift, Burroughs and Bierce used humor as a weapon or, better yet, a scalpel. What do you think about humor and the use of it in art for more serious and subversive purposes?
Because real satire is very rarely done these days, that's one reason why people don't know what to "call" my stuff. The word "satire" is used these days to mean, just funny or sarcastic stuff, sometimes mentioning a politician. So when people find the real thing, they don't know what this is. Satire is a term which has had its meaning changed and the new meaning has been totally accepted, like they've done with the word "anarchy". Or the way people think "schizophrenia" means split personality. But satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to. I do come up against the old problem that, if something's funny, people assume it can't be serious. I tend to totally forget that my writing is funny, and I only see what it's saying - so I think I see a different bunch of Aylett books than some people. A lot of people can't see past the "fireworks" but there it is. Among the real satirists I really love Voltaire. As for William Burroughs, I can't read his stuff on the page, but I like to hear tapes of him reading the stuff. Actually I sent the manuscript of The Crime Studio to Burroughs to get him to do a blurb remark for the back cover - and a week later he was dead.

What are you working on now?
I've done a book called LINT, about a cult author I invented called Jeff Lint, best known as writer of The Caterer comic. LINT is being published by Four Walls Eight Windows in New York. I like it a lot, I think it's my best book. And I'm in the middle of writing a strange thing about an occult fella who is turning the world into useless gold, but I'm not sure about that one yet. But I know for sure what the five or six books after that are going to be, if I'm around long enough. I wrote an issue of Tom Strong comic - issue 27, I think. And I'm doing more CDs of music and comedy and reading-performances, and looking for labels to put them out.

So do people over there think Tony Blair is anywhere near as full of shit as George W. Bush?
Blair is seen as a sort of crypto-fascist psychopath, and a traitor to the people who voted for him. In terms of process the main difference between him and Bush is that Blair was voted in legally - whether that makes it less or more nightmarish is a matter of opinion. But in terms of personality, while Bush is seen worldwide as being phenomenally stupid as well as corrupt, Blair is increasingly seen as being mentally unstable (though both still manage to avoid being at all interesting, somehow). The gap between rich and poor over here is getting even more extreme. A lot of people just want to get out. France gained a lot of respect last year when it kept out of the Iraq thing, and many people seriously considered escaping to France, but lately their intolerant policy on displays of different faiths has been a black mark against them. This first decade of the 2000s feels like a continuation of the early 80s, very frozen up and sterile. Original thought or genuine creativity is frowned upon, to the point of being damn near illegal. But it's mainly just ignored, not acknowledged - some of it may be discovered retrospectively if things loosen up later, but most is lost in the current suffocation. It's like trying to light a match in a vacuum right now.

Any newer writers you'd recommend? Lost classics we might not know about?
I recommend Billy Childish. Greg Egan took cyberpunk as far as it could go in Diaspora. I like an old book by Nelson Algren called Nonconformity. Jean Genet is good. There isn't really much seeing the light of day lately, as originality is so totally discouraged in publishing. Endland Stories by Tim Etchells. Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer. God Head by Scott Zwiren. All from small presses of course.

And lastly, what do you think you might have for your next piece of food?
Codeine.

www.steveaylett.com