Smithereens
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Smithereens gathers 19 stories of misfortune, madness and malady, including ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded’, set in a world where it is ‘undisputed’ that ‘if you tape the average man’s mouth shut he’ll lie through his nose’. Heads are no longer fashionable and are instead encased in ‘headgloves’, which turn out to have undesirable effects, as Brank realises when one day his head expands exponentially … that is, until a train shoots up his nose.Meet ‘Download Syndrome’: ‘Symptoms: 1. Constant talking with aid of cell phones and email; 2. near-zero memory retention; 3. dead-stare; 4. blithely confident attitude.’ Aylett points the finger and asks, ‘when the majority of the world population suffers the same condition, does it become the “new normal”?’‘The Burnished Adventures of Injury Mouse’, the full text of ‘Voyage of the Iguana’, the last ever Beerlight story, ‘Specter’s Way’, ‘Horoscope’ and the closest thing Aylett has ever written to a traditional science-fiction story, ‘Bossanova’ (featuring a robot and two spaceships) are amongst the tales from beyond any existence you can possibly imagine.Smithereens is Aylett’s most recent collection, one in which he outstrips his reputation – ‘He has made a career out of redefining the boundaries of science fiction – and sanity.’ (Barnes & Noble Spotlight Feature).
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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.
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But they had made the mistake of providing him with a set of senses, never guessing that he would use them to perceive the world as it was. Told that he would leave the room immediately, it took him only a few moments to perceive that he would not. He realised that if the mere statement that he would lift a crate meant that he would lift a crate, he need not be there when it was happening – if the statement truly created the fact, then somehow the crate would be lifted by him even if he was seven miles away staring at the ocean. He had been assured that it would be impossible for the crate not to be lifted by him. When his supervisors shouted at him that he had not lifted the crate, he reminded them that they had told him he would. By their own assertion, it was impossible that he hadn’t. In regard to peers and authority, he effectively had a brain of cork, floating over their influence and absorbing nothing.
One day he walked through a wall, got in a truck and drove away despite his handlers’ claims that he would not do so.
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