Lint

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Lint, Steve Aylett's outrageously funny mock biography of iconic writer Jeff Lint, chronicles the pariah's brilliantly bizarre life. From his extensive work in pulp science fiction to his short-lived after-school cartoon that horrified children across the country, and from his rejected scripts for Star Trek to his "thankfully incomplete" autobiography (The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse), Lint was a man who exuded controversy. After publishing a few short stories under the pen name Isaac Asimov, the young Lint moved to New York City to make his mark on the publishing industry. Following a brief conversation with Astounding magazine editor John W. Campbell -- in which Campbell supposedly said, "Pop it through the mail, you know our address" but Lint misinterpreted as, "Poppet, for a male you know how to dress" -- Lint began wearing fashionable women's dresses whenever he submitted stories to publishers. Aside from his brief love affair with a hen and his propensity to wear fright wigs and sharpened wooden teeth in department stores, other noteworthy events in Lint's life include his Star Trek episode where Chekov flirts with McCoy, his attempt at theater (which led to his being shot in the leg with a flaming arrow), and his Magic Bullet theory, which proposes that one perpetually ricocheting bullet has killed numerous political leaders, including Lincoln and JFK. With works like Shamanspace, Atom, and Slaughtermatic, Steve Aylett has made a career out of redefining the boundaries of science fiction -- and sanity. Lint is easily his best and most sustained absurdist work to date. Paul Goat Allen

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. Agent, John Richard Parker at MBA (U.K.). (June 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Although not nearly as well known as Philip K. Dick, Jeff Lint led a bizarre life and enjoyed a prolific but wildly uneven literary career that was eerily similar to that of the famed cosmonaut of consciousness. In this mock biography, Aylett, a Philip K. Dick Award finalist for Slaughtermatic, considers Lint a true revolutionary, noting that in Lint's story "about a hotel of which each floor is located in a different year-creaking floors seem to foreshadow the structure's [both the hotel's and literature's] collapse into postmodernism." Some of Lint's pithy quotes might have emerged from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary: "Civilization is the agreement to have gaps between wars.Pain is God trying to be funny.The Devil is God found out." While reviewing Lint's life and work, Aylett also analyzes and satirizes pulp fiction, science fiction, Hollywood, and American culture from the 1940s through the 1990s. Aylett and Lint, who seems a virtual fictional character himself, are authors to be savored and celebrated. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries and particularly for Dick aficionados.-Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.