is without doubt one of the most ambitious and talented writers to emerge in England in recent years. While his work echoes the best of William Burroughs, it has the mark of real originality. It’s hip, cool and eloquent.’
Michael Moorcock
‘Aylett is one of the great eccentrics of British genre fiction.’
The Guardian
‘Aylett’s prose is like poetry.’
The Independent
‘Utterly original’
SFX
‘The most original and most consciousness-altering living writer in the English language, not to mention one of the funniest.’
Alan Moore
Steve Aylett was born in London in 1967. He is the author of The Crime Studio, Atom, Bigot Hall, Fain the Sorcerer, Slaughtermatic, Rebel at the End of Time, Toxicology, Shamanspace, Smithereens and Novahead – all of which are available via the Serif Books website. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Greek, Finnish, Czech, Russian and Japanese. He is a bitter man.
TOXICOLOGY
by Steve Aylett
Serif
London
This e-book first published 2015 by
Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA
Copyright © Steve Aylett 1999, 2015
Cover ‘Holy Propaganda Vehicle’ copyright © Hauke Vagt 2011, 2015
Introduction copyright © Steve Aylett 2011, 2015
e-book edition copyright © Serif 2015
Steve Aylett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 978 1 909150 41 6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers
e-book produced by Will Dady
“This regime of the surrounding error”
- Jacques Rigaut, Lord Patchogue
“Everything is poison, nothing is poison.”
- Paracelsus
“Snake does not bite man; snake bites what man thinks”
-Vinson Brown
“Learning to speak is like learning to shoot.”
- Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book
INTRODUCTION
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
GIGANTIC
Strange aircraft arrived with the sky that morning, moving blood-slow. And Professor Skychum was forced from the limelight at the very instant his ranted warnings became most poignant. “They’re already here!”
Skychum had once been so straight you could use him to aim down, an astrophysicist to the heart. No interest in politics—to him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size. Then one afternoon he had a vision which he would not shut up about.
The millennium was the dull rage that year and nutters were in demand to punctuate the mock-emotional retrospectives filling the countdown weeks. The media considered that Skychum fit the bill—in fact they wanted him to wear one.
And the stuff he talked about. There were weaknesses in his presentation, as he insisted that the whole idea occurred to him upon seeing Scrappy Doo’s head for the first time. “That dog is a mutant!” he gasped, leaning forward in such a way, and with so precise an appalled squint to the eyes, that he inadvertently pierced the constrictive walls of localized spacetime. A flare of interface static and he was seeing the whole deal like a lava-streamed landscape. He realized he was looking at the psychic holoshape of recent history, sickly and corrosive. Creeping green flows fed through darkness. These volatile glow trails hurt with incompletion. They converged upon a cess pit, a supersick build-up of denied guilt. This dumping ground was of such toxicity it had begun to implode, turning void-black at its core. Like a fractal, detail reflecting the whole. Skychum saw at once the entire design and the subatomic data. Zooming in, he found that a poison line leading from two locations nevertheless flowed from a single event—Pearl Harbor. One source was the Japanese government, the other was Roosevelt’s
