Fantastic Metropolis

I very rarely write reviews, and the only motive to do it is the futile one of trying to redress the balance—I mean, because most reviews are so badly written.

I was involved in a radio thing a while ago, but came up against the imposed vacuum we’ve got with everything at the moment. It was a four-episode thing for BBC Radio 4, and I was instructed that for every original, unusual or interesting idea in the script, 5,000 listeners would switch off. So I was meant to go through it, stripping the ideas out. I actually went along with it for a while, to my shame. Finally there was basically nothing there, but I was told it was still too relentless, so I walked away. And this was something that was very light even at the beginning, based on the couple of Caltagan Sharp stories in Toxicology, basically P. G. Wodehouse parodies. The lightest, airiest things I’ve ever written. But no, people wouldn’t like hearing those damned inconvenient ideas. I feel like ripping my own face off, really.

Rick Klaw: For our readers out there, can you explain vimana?

Steve Aylett: These are spaceships and weird flying machines described in the ancient Vedic literature of India. Some are described in quite a bit of technical detail, and the drawings which late-19^th and early 20^th century scholars created from these descriptions are quite beautiful. Strange spaceships with veined sails.

Rick Klaw: If you could work with any other writer’s universe/creation, what would it be?

Steve Aylett: On balance I prefer doing my own stuff, but it is strange how you can get into the creative atmosphere of someone else’s creation if the situation arises, as I found with Tom Strong. I was surprised how relatively normal I ended up writing it. I suppose the most interesting thing would be to take a former good thing which has become bland and bring it back to fertility, or maybe better than it ever was. Like an Anne Rice vampire book as good as The Vampire Lestat. Or in film, a Hellraiser sequel that was actually scary, atmospheric and unexpected, can you imagine?

Rick Klaw: Why do you think your Tom Strong story turned out so “normal”?

Steve Aylett: A writer can get into the atmosphere and structure of something that’s already created, if it’s a good enough one and they’re into it. I don’t necessarily mean “normal” in the normal sense. And it was a style I was happy to indulge in, as Alan Moore is one of the few creators I respect and one of the very few human beings I like as a person.

Rick Klaw: Along those same lines, is there anyone dead or alive, you’d like to collaborate with?

Steve Aylett: Alive, it would be interesting to do something with David Lynch, like a really creepy musical or something. And dead, it would be good to meet the greatest (published) satirist Voltaire, though he’d probably just give me a sharp look and punch me in the throat. Also among the dead it would be good to give Spalding Gray an awkward hug and say thanks, but I couldn’t improve on his particular genre.

Rick Klaw: Why couldn’t you improve on the satirist (Spalding Gray’s) genre?

Steve Aylett: Gray wasn’t a satirist—he did a humorous observation exaggerated confessional monologue performance thing, and whatever label that ends up getting, I couldn’t even approach what Gray did if I tried it. I saw him do Slippery Slope and it was great stuff. And no-one could say “scuba guru” like him. David Sedaris tries something like Gray but sticks to his script, they’re basically readings, though very funny anyway. Meanwhile, elsewhere, satire is something else entirely, with totally different mechanisms working in it. A lot of people these days don’t know what real satire is—they think it’s sarcasm, or impersonation, or humorous commentary, while real satire actually has a lot of very particular crunching mechanisms working in it, it’s not slapdash and rarely splashy, it’s not just sarcasm, or humor, or commentary, or impersonation, or those things together. It’s a very precise cutting tool.