Steve Aylett

Steve Aylett was born in Bromley, England, in 1967. He left school at 17 and worked in a book warehouse, and later in trade and law publishing - here he invented the concept of 'fractal litigation', whereby the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world results in a massive compensation claim on the other.

His first book The Crime Studio, published in 1994, was generally regarded as a 'cry for help'. This was followed by Bigot Hall, Slaughtermatic, The Inflatable Volunteer, Toxicology and Atom. He is published by Orion in the UK and Four Walls Eight Windows in the US, and was nominated for the 1998 Philip K Dick Award (Slaughtermatic).

His toured 'Shroud' show, during which he silently impersonated the Shroud of Turin, caused rage and impatience in clubland in the early '90s.

His stories have appeared in the bestselling Disco Biscuits anthologies (Sceptre). He lives in Brighton, England.

Steve Aylett in his own words:

It's less insulting to the reader to say something in a few words, like 'Progress accelerates downhill', than to spend an entire book saying that.

I still just write the kind of books I'd like to read, that I'd like to find out there, and luckily enough people share that taste to be into them.

I don't like zany. I often feel people don't see past all the fireworks to what I'm talking about. Maybe sometime I'll do something with all the fireworks stripped out, no jokes, for the hard-of-reading - so they'll see what's always been there from the beginning.

Placing your head inside the reaction out there will certainly rot your brain, it's a displacement of energy. People may read one of my things and think it's all a particular way, for good or ill. But there's Slaughtermatic, which is fairly conventional old-time satire which nodody else does these days, then there's The Inflatable Volunteer which has no satire and is this big splurge of funny poetics. And later there's stuff that's unlike any of that because I've hardly started yet. So I have to disregard all this. My head stays here.

I certainly don't think in words. I'm not sure that anyone does. Does anyone really think in sentences, like in films when you see someone thinking and you hear a voice-over? I don't anyway, I see stuff visually, as shapes, colours, textures and mechanisms sort of hanging there in space. If there's a hole in someone's argument I visually see a hole in it, in the armature and mass of the thing. I'll see the shape of a whole book that way before it's written, and so far, the books have all ended up the way I saw them originally.

If a saxophone became fossilized, how would anyone know it had never been an animal?

Rain sounds the same everywhere.