he infamous and eccentric SF writer known to the world as Jeff Lint (1928-1994) here receives his first-ever full-scale biography. In 27 pithy chapters, Steve Aylett—himself well known for such sputterings of phonemes as Slaughtermatic (1998) and the recent Accomplice quartet (2001-04)—recounts the miraculous birth, promising start, transcendent mid-career and traumatically dilatory conclusion to Lint's life. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of the enigmatic scope of this volume is to tweak highlights from each chapter like shrapnel from a bomb victim.
Chapter 1 is an overview of Lint's career and place in the science-fiction field, as well as an account of Aylett's personal stake in this whole quasi-literary imbroglio. Chapter 2 ushers Lint into the world, a troublesome, hebephrenic boy looking for a "new color" to call his own. Discovering Weird Tales in 1937, Lint sealed his own fate like a man immuring himself in a cask of port. Childhood friends Alan Rouch and Cameo Herzog play roles in Chapter 3, with Rouch going on to become a lifelong stanchion in Lint's jumbled existence, while Herzog becomes his sworn enemy. Chapter 4 finds young man Lint in New York City, friend to the Beats, while Chapter 5 brings us to the 1950s, when Lint sold an astonishing 123 stories to the SF digests.
Lint is fully mortared into the pulp lifestyle in Chapter 6, but begins to break out with his first novel—Jelly Result in Chapter 7. As we learn in Chapter 8, Lint has ideas aplenty for more books, and the transition from story writer to novelist occurs fully in Chapter 9. Lint's insufferable talents bring him to the animation field in Chapter 10, while his collected essays burn brightly in Chapter 11. A flaming foray into teleplays blinds us in Chapter 12, as Lint turns his flensing gaze to the original Star Trek series. Chapter 13 finds Lint committing journalism, while 14 transubstantiates him to Hollywood.
Lint's career achieves a stern and monitory acceleration the older he gets, moving through a novel on JFK's assassination (15), a spiritual epiphany-cum-breakdown (16), rumors of his death (17), a probe into comics (18), a mature trilogy, the "Arkwitch" books (19) and, finally, a spasmodic stint as a rock star (20).
Now we're on the downhill side of the mountain, as Lint enters the 1980s. His Easy Prophecy series is derided (21 through 23). A last major novel, Clowns and Locusts, perjures itself (24), while Lint becomes a recluse (25) and dies (26). The final chapter is a posthumous snicker. Notes, quotes, bibliography and index arrive late for the party.
Satiric melancholy surrealism
As you perhaps have guessed from my less-than-serious rendition above of the events of Aylett's book, this hilarious jape is an uncategorizable piece of humorous writing. Its subject-hero and all the 10,000 utterly bizarre facts of his life, as well as the mind-boggling titles and plots of his creations, all spring from the frighteningly fertile brainpan of Mr. Aylett. In this sense, we are reminded of such rare previous excursions in this vein as Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972) and Stanislaw Lem's "reviews" of fictitious books, collected in Imaginary Magnitude (1984), as well as Barry Malzberg's seminal Herovit's World (1973) and Kurt Vonnegut's various references to Kilgore Trout.
Aylett follows the template of these ancestors by infusing Lint and his career with a wealth of allusiveness to real-world events, institutions and people. Lint can be seen as a composite of dozens of writers, from Philip K. Dick, primarily, to Ellison, Sturgeon, Moorcock, Bukowski, Jim Thompson and Hunter Thompson. "Real" personages such as John W. Campbell mingle with fictitious counterparts, lending a cracked verisimilitude to the whole project. Aylett knows the history of SF from the inside out and, more importantly, understands the psychic toll exacted by the writing life of the marginal fantasticator. His portrait of Lint is not only deeply comic but also cuttingly satirical.
But it would be hard to sustain such a conceit at book length if it were not for the glory of Aylett's baroque, Perelmanesque prose. He's a genuine heir to the Dadaists and Surrealists, coining "exquisite corpses" of sense-deranged sentences, studded with truly catchy aphorisms and apothegms. Eminently quotable—"Civilization is the agreement to have gaps between wars"—Lint/Aylett will implant memes in your mind faster than a termite can lay eggs.
Aylett's previous books have flourished in undiscovered countries of the mind. By colonizing our consensual reality for the first time with Lint's tale, he's proven he is an unstoppable master of space and time—much like Lint himself.
