Lint by Steve Aylett

Readers feeling adventurous would be well served not bothering to read the rest of this review and simply going out and buying the book. This is the kind of book that will appeal to the adventurous, and in any case further along this review a major plot element will have to be spoiled. Anyway, this is a biography of one Jeff Lint, a sci-fi writer whose visionary fictions much resemble those of Philip K. Dick. Or so Steve Aylett would have it, but - and here's the spoiler - Jeff Lint is in fact an entirely fictional creation. So this book is in fact a clever spoof of the sci-fi scene throughout the last century, with Lint writing books with titles like Jelly Result, Turn Me Into a Parrot and I Blame Ferns. Some of these are no doubt clever references to existing sci-fi works, others are just daft surrealism. The whole book is built on not knowing one from the other, and whilst funny, having to wade through streams of obscure surrealism to get to the jokes gets very wearing at times. This is a shame, because there are some fascinating concepts here, but Aylett's writing mimics Jeff Lint's in that it mostly squanders such concepts. In a way, this itself is some kind of a triumph, but is that a good thing? An extremely puzzling book. [Ryan Agee]