Vurt

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Bridget must have the same feeling; she was looking daggers at the new girl (Mandy), smoke rising from her skin, as she tried her best to tune into Beetle's head.” Bridget is a real human girl but with special qualities including the extrasensory ability to read other people's minds which makes her a shadowgirl. One thing's for certain: it bodes well Bridget is a bona fide member of the Stash Riders since, in the bugged out turf of this futuristic England, a gang needs all the powers it can muster.

However, despite being nihilistic and ultimately a Faustian tale with some bits of the Orpheus myth and the Hero's Journey welded on to it, Vurt manages an almost cheerful tone. An early scene sees Scribble and Mandy trying to get the Thing into their apartment from the van and being questioned by their neighbor, a repressed old woman, and it makes an excellent bit of uncomfortable comedy. There are also some interesting and kind of lighthearted scenes with Peaches, the star of several "pornovurts" made by reclusive designer Icarus Wing. For a dystopia where sections are literally paved with jagged broken glass, it's surprisingly bright and actually kind of a cool place to live, once you can forget the population is on several different kind of drugs, fighting with each other, screwing over "pure" humans, and liable to be bitten by snakes from a dream dimension. Noon's first four novels, which share ongoing characters and settings, are commonly referred to as the 'Vurt series' (after the first novel). Cox, Rob (21 August 2015), BRINGING JEFF NOON'S VURT TO THE TABLE, Tor Books , retrieved 24 August 2015

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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 )

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. Jeff Noon and David Toop also released a CD, Needle in the Groove: if music were a drug, where would it take you, on Sulphur Records in the same year. The character of Desdemona is based on the character of the same name from William Shakespeare's play Othello. The lists of numbered ideas – now in the thousands – that he has poured into Moleskine notebooks since the 80s are now pouring online: "The spores have become my ideas journal." A collection of remixed spores, Pixel Dust, is in the pipeline. He talks excitedly about online poetry subcultures, hypnagogic pop, liquid culture and digital ghosts. A vast project called "Electronic Nocturne" considers what post-digital culture might look like. "We're so entrenched in the digital age that we don't think it will end – but, of course, one day it will. I've been trying to imagine what will come after that and it's quite a difficult thing … " Different coloured feathers provide different experiences, but Scribble is searching for his lost love and only one feather offers the hope of finding her. It’s the ultimate feather, it may not even exist at all: Curious Yellow.

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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. 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. Through the gates of Vurt the people could re-visit their own dreams, or, more dangerously, visit another person’s dream, a stranger’s dream,” Noon writes. In Noon’s earlier Vurt, Vurt itself is more dreamlike, but by the time of Pollen is (and its denizens) have become more self-aware. Or, as Noon phrases it: “[T]he creatures of the dream, as they grew more powerful, started to despise and look down upon the original dreamers.” Cue a conflict between worlds.