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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.
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‘Three wishes is it?’ thought Fain. ‘He’s probably a total nutter but just in case, I’d better choose carefully.’ For he knew such situations are notoriously sticky and fraught with unforeseen consequences. Magical literature was full of stories of impulsive dreamers asking for stupid things like ‘an endless supply of sardines’ and so on. Fain considered his options as carefully as he could with the threat of capture upon him. Then he piped up. ‘Alright, old man—if this broken rubbish really does have the power to grant wishes, here are mine. One, that I can travel into the past to whatever time I wish, at will. Two, that I be given the knowledge of how to wake the Princess up at the castle. And three, that I have an endless supply of sardines.’
‘You choose well, young stranger,’ cackled the old lunatic.
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