From Publishers Weekly
Informed SF readers, particularly Philip K. Dick fans, will enjoy British author Aylett's laugh-out-loud (mock) biography of (fictitious) cult writer Jeff Lint, though the dense prose, rife with odd word juxtapositions, can be daunting. Aylett (
Slaughtermatic) traces his subject's strange life from Lint's early days in the 1940s writing for the pulps (including
Astounding, Baffling and
Maximum Tentacles) to the rumors of his untimely death and beyond. Lint unsuccessfully dabbled in almost every genre imaginable: short stories, novels (
Jelly Result), comics (
The Caterer), cartoons and Hollywood screenplays (
Nose Furnace). Lint's script for a never-made
Star Trek episode, notable for its wild creativity and unfilmable special effects, led Gene Roddenberry to exclaim, "This isn't prose, it's gnats in formation!" Aylett doesn't shrink from providing revealing details of Lint's feud with rival Cameo Herzog, nor of Lint's habit of cross-dressing when he delivered his manuscripts, which he always did in person. Illustrations of such items as Lint jacket art and a page from his
Star Trek script add to the fun.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Aylett's steady output of ribald, unpredictably plotted novels has earned him a reputation as one of sf's true mavericks. Here he brings his madcap energy to the satirical "biography" of an eccentric author of antic sf, Jeff Lint. Aylett traces Lint's peripatetic and occasionally violent career from his early days pawning short fiction off on
Amazing Stories under his "pen name"--Isaac Asimov--to his psychedelic years churning out formula fiction in the sixties to his eventual demise in the nineties. Along the way, Lint arouses suspicion when both his agent and his chief rival die under mysterious circumstances, and he himself becomes the object of "Lint is dead" rumors. Aylett's multidimensional account of Lint's livelihood includes snapshots of the book covers of such titles as
I Blame Ferns and
Doomed but Confident, an exhaustive bibliography, and an addendum of choice Lint quotations; for instance, "When the abyss gazes into you, bill it." Readers with the taste for offbeat humor of the Douglas Adams, genre-spoofing variety should savor Aylett's latest.
Carl HaysCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
