Vurt

Product Information

Babel Street (2008) - co-written with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod and William Shaw, originally only available online, now no longer available

I guess you have to have been there. If you have the right past - and if you've come past it far enough - you can identify with everything this book reveals. We've all known a Beetle, we've all known a Game Cat. We've been on the ride and we know how it eventually rings hollow, and we know how it feels when it ends. If you've had the experiences, you can follow every loop as it goes round. A young boy puts a feather into his mouth ... " So, in 1993, began Jeff Noon's first novel, Vurt. It was something the like of which had never been seen before, and it established Noon – then a struggling 35-year-old playwright earning rent by working in the Deansgate branch of Waterstones and writing at night – as a figure of major promise in British science fiction. The character of Desdemona is based on the character of the same name from William Shakespeare's play Othello.Thrown into this conflict, this otherworldly plague, are two people. Sibyl Jones, a "Shadowcop" able to read peoples' thoughts and astrally project herself, who becomes embroiled in the case after examining Coyote's body; and an Xcabber named Boda (short for Bodiceaea) who becomes the plot of an assassination attempt due to her association with Coyote and Sibyl. With the aid of pirate radio DJ Gumbo Ya Ya, the two of them must find out why Vurtuality is bleeding into reality, and what it has to do with plans to introduce a "new map" to realign the city both psychically and physically with the Vurtual world. But there are forces massing against them, forces both in the flowers and in positions of authority, and if Sibyl and Boda are to get to the bottom of this, they will need to face death, an ancient Satan figure, a man made out of orchids, and finally something dark within themselves. The idea of rituals as a kind of vast psychogeographic machine is the sort of grand and bizarre idea that Noon’s work abounds with. The Nyquist novels at times feel like loving tributes to the genres that shaped their author, but they’re also anything but pastiche. Just as Jeff Noon’s fictional investigators probe the boundaries between the real and the surreal, so too is their author venturing into uncharted realms, and finding out what happens when unexpected stories suddenly converge. Babel Street was a collaborative project between four authors, Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, William Shaw and Noon. Only published online, this collection of short stories is set in a fictional British apartment building and features stories about the lives of each inhabitant, to which each author contributed. No longer available online. The first half of this book was great reading with intriguing characters, good mystery and well paced and just weird enough to make it even more interesting. The second half of it was absolute and utter waffling nonsense. It lost its momentum so suddenly and completely that I even lost any connection I may have had with the characters up to that point.

For an author with a well-developed sense of the anti-authoritarian, Noon has found an interesting way to express that. This year saw the release of his third novel featuring private detective John Nyquist, an investigator making his way across a surreal version of 1959 England. It’s not the only novel of Noon’s to take an investigator as its central character— Pollen, his follow-up to Vurt, is also something of a police procedural. And his recent crime novel Slow Motion Ghosts is also centered around a police detective. It’s an interesting outlier in Noon’s work in that there are no overtly fantastical or uncanny elements in the story—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of feints in that direction.

Recent Comments

The people who suffer from newmonia (pronounced the same as the real condition pneumonia), are hybrids of humans and other entities. They are mainly hybrids of animals and humans, but also of other random items such as kitchen sinks and pianos. First creepy thing. The obsession with sex. Sex with anything that moves, and some things that don't. Because clearly if there was a miracle drug that allowed you to have sex with anything... and have children from that sex, everyone would be doing it. At least, Noon thinks so, resulting in a world full of dog-human hybrids and... corpse-human hybrids. There's also some dodgy stuff with a technically ancient being in the form of a child which was.... yeah.... Cobralingus sits apart from Noon's other published works. It is part anthology of poems and part instructional textbook for Noon's style of poetry. In it, he details his regimented methods for the creation of poetic text by a style of word play which lends its name to the title. Also included are various exemplars of this style.

The characters. Let’s talk about them for a second. I couldn’t relate to any of them. Perhaps I’m not British enough. Perhaps I haven’t done enough of the right drugs. Perhaps - and I think this may be it - they are just shit. There was a single character I felt a touch more than nothing for and she disappears before the halfway mark only to make a brief and inconsequential appearance toward the end. Awesome. Noon's first four novels, which share ongoing characters and settings, are commonly referred to as the 'Vurt series' (after the first novel). I remember my sharp delight, in 1993 on first discovering Vurt’s hallucinogenic VR-induced Manchester. It instantly became one of my favourite examples of new directions in science fiction, and remains so these decades later!” que se pueden interpretar como drogas, o como enlaces de red, o como quieras, tampoco se molesta en explicarlo mucho.Noon gave up drinking around 15 years ago, because "I had to" he says. "If you want to know the hideous details, I used to book into hotels – really cheap hotels in Manchester – for a couple of nights. Just buy wine, and orange juice, and aspirin. Although the fictional chronology leads from Automated Alice to Nymphomation to Vurt to Pollen, the books were originally published as Vurt (1993), Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996), and Nymphomation (1997). ( Automated Alice connects the series to the fictional world of Lewis Carroll), serving as a 'trequel' [ sic] to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass )