Little Toy Robot

Lint is a hilarious fake biography by Steve Aylett. (Good luck finding it: in my local Borders it was in the Sci-Fi section under “L.”) There’s more than a little Steve Aylett in Jeff Lint, an oddball writer of pulp and esoteric fiction as well as some comics and many (mostly rejected) film and tv scripts. But there’s also plenty of Philip K. Dick and Harry Stephen Keeler and god-knows-who-else in Lint. The good news is, even if the book is a roman-a-clef of post-WWII Science Fiction, it can be read and enjoyed on its own merits. Lint is portrayed as a character whose own life was art, an art that serves to baffle, irritate, obfuscate, and just plain subvert the world.

There’s some great Lint stuff online, such as this supplement on Fantastic Metropolis and the Lint Web site, which serves as a good introduction to the project:

Lint was the author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical pulp SF of the late 20th century. As well as writing satirical classics such as Jelly Result and Fanatique, he also created TV cartoon Catty and the Major and cult 70s comic The Caterer. Like his contemporary, Philip K Dick, he did not gain any widespread recognition until a movie adaptation of one of his stories (The Jarkman) appeared shortly after his death. He was the first person to steal Michael Moorcock’s ‘Multiverse’ idea and the first to point out to Jack Vance how unfortunate the title ‘Servants of the Wankh’ really was.

Update: Lint’s comics career is highlighted in this excerpt on The Alien Online.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 8:19 am and is filed under books.