"Novahead is the fourth novel in Steve
Aylett’s 'Beerlight' series alongside The
Crime Studio (1994), Atom (2000)
and Slaughtermatic (1997) as well as
select stories from the fiction collections Toxicology
(1999) and Smithereens (2010). All
are stand-alone narratives set in the dystopian, über-absurdist Beerlight City,
although Novahead features the same
protagonist as Atom, an unhinged
private investigator with a penchant for creative ultraviolence and anabolic proverbs
in equal measure. On the front cover, Alan Moore calls Aylett '[t]he most
original and most consciousness-altering living writer in the English language,
not to mention one of the funniest.' By definition, book blurbs are hyperbolic
marketing ploys, but in this case, Moore isn’t far off target. A fanatical satirist
and provocateur, Aylett writes in multiple genres, usually simultaneously,
combining elements of science fiction and fantasy with high comedy
('splattershtick') and a high literary aesthetic. As a result of his unique method
of hybridization, Aylett has not garnered much of a readership beyond devotees
in underground circles who tend to worship him like a bogie in the sky. He is simply
too clever and grandiloquent for genre readers, and he’s too genre for literary readers, infusing his
metanarratives with intricate networks of hi-tech and/or bizarre novums. In
short, Aylett, as a stylist and storyteller, operates on a plateau that looms
in the distance, ahead of his time, and Novahead
achieves new heights of ingenuity, aesthetics and entertainment. Evidently it
will be the last Beerlight novel according to the book description on the back
cover. It is a fitting swan song to a series that, at the very least, artfully satirizes
the technological pathology of the human condition as seen in real life,
American media, and the history of the science fiction genre."
