Читать книгу Toxicology - Steve Aylett - Страница 2

This collection of early stories displays a variety of ghastly objects I removed from the surface of my brain, including the 9/11 story “Gigantic” (first published in 1998), my take on The Bible Code (“The Waffle Code”) and “Resenter”, the first of several “one particle of honesty destroys an entire city” stories I’ve produced over the years—a feelgood fantasy for me. I’ve stated that school is a thing to spend the rest of your life recovering from, and its toxic incoherence is portrayed in “Infestation,” my first published story. “Repeater,” a period piece on early rave culture, contains a fairly good prophecy of the twenty-zeroes and beyond: “Denial. Vacuum competes with vacuum. Laws outlaw the harmless to make the effective inconceivable. Scholarly incomprehension. No questions asked. Banality given the terms and prestige of science. Ignorance worn like a heraldic crest. Mediocrity loudly rewarded. Misery by installments. Hypocrisy too extreme to process. Maintenance of a feeble public imagination. Lavish access to useless data. Fashion as misdirection. Social meltdown in a cascade pattern, consumed by a drought of significance.” There’s also a riff on the recent police/press bugging ‘revelations’, “The Met Are All For This” (first published 1997).

The smattering of Beerlight stories are from various points throughout that city’s history. The collateral and mis-directed aggression story “Shifa”, named after the Al Shifa aspirin factory, would fit well into the days of The Crime Studio. “The Siri Gun” is set after the events of Atom but before those of Slaughtermatic, and we see it referred to in Novahead.

There are some experiments that I only got to work later (making the precise seem random), others I stuck with regardless (dialogue so stylized it would get you killed within seconds on the street) and yet others I never got to work (making stupid characters interesting).

Smithereens are hard to aggregate. Penguins can slide on their bellies but the humour is wasted on those stiff-billed bastards—yet put a paper hat on an owl and it’s you who feels like a fool. I hope you find something here that you like.

Steve Aylett, 2011