Slaughtermatic

by Steve Aylett

He had found a scene where Biff Barbanel glances at a book called Punching the Sarge - by clicking on the title Dante found he could access the full text of Sarge, in which a brilliant mathematician shoots himself with a foam gun and drowns. Shortly before this denouement, a football coach quotes from The Tangle Hymn, the text of which Dante accessed with a single click. In Tangle there are numerous references to the fictitious author of The Think Tank, in which a bigot bums a copy of Parashite, which includes a scene in which a drowsy cleric browses through Knitting the Ties That Bind, at the front of which In Your Dreams is decorously quoted. In Your Dreams includes a reference to Bloody Rest, in which someone chews up a page from After the Future and flobs it at a passing jogger. Seven hundred levels, each level a different book, each written in the ‘torrential’ style so frowned upon for saving time. It was a sub-entry vortex, processing faster than light.