Spare a thought for Martin Amis. If it’s not his Dad Kingsley sounding off about his novelistic style (“Little sod said on TV you had to read it twice. Well then he’s FAILED hasn’t he?”), then it’s teeth, advances, Julian Barnes, Islamofascism, feminists, Katie Price, the elderly, and now the mother of his god-daughter nip, nip, nipping away at him.
Amis Jnr, eyes ruined by Atari
He must feel like the lone defending space-tank confronting wave after wave of cephalopod shock troops. I know he does – since a little known Amis volume came out in 1982 and has never been reprinted. It was his first non-fiction book, Invasion of the Space Invaders, a study of the then-futuristic arcade game. I read it a long time ago, and it’s the kind of essay that Geoff Dyer or Andrew O’Hagan would do well now. I can’t wait for the inevitable academic study to be written on the influence of Space Invaders on the Amis canon. There’s the obsession with games, particularly ones you inevitably lose at. There’s the resonance of crumbling psychological shields.
A screen-shot from London Fields
We got an Atari home console when I was nine, and I still remember the initial thrill of playing Space Invaders. Then there was the bathos of realising that each level was going to be the same, only more difficult. Then finally the sheer tedium of predictability. A bit like some novelists’ careers.
McShandy's 
I seem to derive more entertainment reading Amisian peccadilloes nowadays than I do reading his novels. Then again, those articles aren’t written by Mart.
I’m looking forward to his polemic on Pacman.
I think his polemic on Pacman was Money – eat, eat, eat, eat, big eat, ghost, eat, eat, ghost, cherry (lost), eat ghost, am invcible, ghost came out of nowhere
Scrolling down the Wikipedia entry on Amis, I see that his non-fiction debut is actually mentioned. What is not addressed on the page is his scriptwriting on the truly awful “Saturn 3”. I always like to remind people that his name is attached to this gratuitous waste of talent because it’s worth remembering when considering his difficult relationship with SF:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079285/
Wikipedia mentions; I’ve read the damn thing. “Saturn 3”: shudder, shudder, shudder. Of course, SF was Daddy and Martin doesn’t like filial primogeniture.