Primrose Path Travelogue: Gen X

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Steve Aylett

Steve Aylett (b. 1967 in Bromley, United Kingdom) is a satirical science fiction and slipstream author of several bizarro books. He is renowned for his colorful satire attacking the manipulations of authority, and for having reams of amusing epigrams and non-sequiturs only tangentially related to what little plot the books possess. His protagonists are frequently based on the Trickster archetype (eg. Taffy Atom, Jeff Lint, Jack Marsden).

Aylett left school at age 17 and worked in a book warehouse, and later in law publishing.

Aylett claims to have books appear in his brain in one visual "glob" which looks like a piece of gum (but denies it's "channelled"). ^[1]

Bibliography

Beerlight:
- The Crime Studio (1994)
- Slaughtermatic (1997)
- Atom (2000)
Accomplice:
1. Only an Alligator (2002)
2. The Velocity Gospel(2002)
3. Dummyland (2002)
4. Karloff's Circus (2004)
Bigot Hall (1995)
The Inflatable Volunteer(1999)
Toxicology (collection) (first edition 1999, expanded version 2001)
Shamanspace (2001)
LINT(2005)
Fain the Sorcerer
And Your Point Is?'

Beerlight

Slaughtermatic, The Crime Studio, Atom and some of Toxicology are set in a supposedly future dystopian town called Beerlight, apparently modelled on Baltimore.

Accomplice

Only an Alligator, The Velocity Gospel, Dummyland, and Karloff's Circus are set in Accomplice, a suburb on a tropical peninsula in a perhaps nuclear-blasted future, underneath which live demons. Aylett says he is in the tradition of "real satirists" such as Voltaire, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.

Comic books

He has written issue #27 of Tom Strong and a comic called The Nerve, as well as visual artefacts such as Jeff Lint's comic The Caterer. Newer projects include The Promissory for ARTHUR magazine’s ‘mimeo’ line.

Quotes

- The truth is easiest to disprove - its defences are down.

- One thing you’ll say for skeletons, they’ll always give you a smile.

- ideas are self-replenishing, like snot

- You cannot ice-skate and be bewildered at the same time.

- In America fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that.

Awards and nominations

Slaughtermatic was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998.

Jack Trevor Story Award 2006

Notes

^ Rick Klaw, "A Glob of Multicolored Chiming Vibrational Bubble Gum: An Interview with Steve Aylett", Fantastic Metropolis (19 February 2005)

External links

Friday, March 16, 2007

Will Christopher Baer

Will Christopher Baer is an American author of noir fiction, often delving into sex, violence, mystery and erotica. Currently published works include Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful and Hell's Half Acre, all of which have since been published in the single volume Phineas Poe. His fourth novel, Godspeed, will be published by MacAdam/Cage in Fall, 2007.

Biography

Born in Mississippi in 1966. As a child, he lived in Montreal and Italy. He attended highschool in Memphis, TN and moved on to attend Tulane University in New Orleans, LA but he soon dropped out. However, he received a B.A. at Memphis State. He then headed west in 1990 and lived in Portland & Eugene Oregon for several years. He received an MFA in 1995 from Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. He has lived in California since 1996, primarily in the Bay Area and L.A.

In college, he primarily studied Shakespeare, Faulkner, and James Joyce. He has worked as a homeless counselor, taxi driver, bartender, video store geek, screenwriter, journalist and as a college professor at Evergreen State, Olympia, WA.

Short stories of his have been published in numerous places, notably Nerve and Bomb. First of the Phineas Poe novels, Kiss Me, Judas originally published in 1999, was selected as Barnes & Noble best new voice, and was translated into five languages. Penny Dreadful was published in 2001.

He is married, and has one child by previous marriage. He has one brother, and his parents are still living.

He shares a fan base with fellow authors Craig Clevenger and Stephen Graham Jones.

Trivia

Will Christopher Baer finished Kiss Me, Judas in two weeks while staying in a borrowed artist's studio in East Bay that had a coffeemaker, cheap stereo, and toilet. Penny Dreadful spilled out over the course of several months in a Motel 6, while Hell's Half Acre was written in a rented room over a bar in North Beach.