Vurt

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Vurt started with a cool premise. A future Manchester UK filled with an assortment of new species of human, a new social structure, and, the central feature of the book, a new drug/game/escape from reality called vurt. It´s definitively not that beat poet, beatnik generation road trip garbage, far better, because one notices the competence of the author who is, if his biography is correct, more high on literature than mind altering hallucinogens, but again, what is it? I guess everyone has to find out on her/his own and it would interest me if the bad rating of some of his other works are because of the complexity of what he writes or because he finally came too close to fantastic realism and poisoned his art like many before him. Getting what one desperately needs has hardly ever been such a mind boggling, confusing, psychedelic trip. 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. In 2018, Netflix optioned the rights to Vurt from Ravendesk Entertainment to create a television series, the pilot for which was written by Stranger Things writer/producer, Paul Dichter; however, after more than two years in development, the series was never greenlit for production.

Dreamsnakes came out of a bad feather called Takshaka. Any time something small and worthless was lost to the Vurt, one of these snakes crept through in exchange. Those snakes were talking over, I swear. You couldn't move for them.” Thus speaketh Scribble. And Scribble should know since a dreamsnake once sunk its fangs into his lower leg. Result: Scribble always carries around something of the Vurt in his blood. Things changed for my second novel, Pollen: by then I had really discovered the melancholic joys of house and techno music, and I think the novel reflects that change. Pollen is a much more tangled book, more fertile, a very overgrown, edge-of-wilderness narrative. [1] Songs mentioned [ edit ] 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. Vurt and the books that followed – there was a sequel, Pollen, and a prequel, Nymphomation – elaborated a fluid mythos that combined rave culture, druggy fantasy, intimations of cyberspace, weird maths and overlays of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (an abiding obsession registered in all Noon's books) with classical myth and English folktale.

Secondly, the character of Long Distance Davis, who Alice meets in a police cell, is a reference to jazz musician and trumpet player Miles Davis. Vivid, restless, street-writing, neon-noir, ranging widely through fantasies and rationalities. An utterly unique, quite brilliant piece of writing.” Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy. 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. 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.

I loved the writing style of Jeff Noon and the story as a whole. A snippet that gives a small synopsis of what this drug induced book is about:

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Creeping Jenny takes a subtle swerve in its last quarter, maintaining its sense of folk horror but embracing a kind of speculative element as well. One character refers to the idea of the saints as “a sort of computational device.” This device, then, might serve some higher purpose: “a way of forcing us to experience many different kinds of behavior, a lot of it extreme in nature, on a regular basis, year after year.”

Hailed as the novel that reinvented cyberpunk, The 30th Anniversary edition of Jeff Noon’s award winning cult classic, Vurt. 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.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 … " But just as that isn’t quite the cyberspace of William Gibson, neither is Noon precisely a cyberpunk author—the portrait that he paints of England seems to be less of a near future vision and more one of a slightly altered reality, period. It would make for an excellent double bill with Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet—both are books set in a skewed world where all things mythical take on a heightened position, and the delirious manifestations of art resonate on unexpected frequencies. In the case of Vurt, that comes through the dreamlike realm that its characters enter, populated by beings from fiction, mythology, and the collective unconscious. Scribble - the eyes through which we see this world and the obvious protagonist - let’s talk about him. He’s a junkie. You feel for him initially because he lost his lover in the Vurt and is trying to find her. Then you realize that this lost lover is also his sister and, surprisingly, you just don’t care for him that much any more. Could I ever care about a main character in an incestual relationship? Sure, if you give me a million words spread across five books and your name is George RR Martin. Jeff Noon’s Vurtis one of the most beautiful speculative fiction works of the past several decades. Andrew Wenaus’ new book does justice to Vurtin its full mind-blowing complexity, tracing out how the novel offers us new ways to think and to feel.” (Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University)

Cox, Rob (21 August 2015), BRINGING JEFF NOON'S VURT TO THE TABLE, Tor Books , retrieved 24 August 2015There are also references to popular musical figures, with two notable characters. Firstly, James Marshall Hentrails, a sculpture made of rubbish, and who contains the insides (entrails) of a hen. This character is obviously a reference to Jimi Hendrix. The character also sings a song while playing the guitar. The song is titled 'Little Miss Bonkers', a reference to 'Little Miss Strange' by Hendrix. [ original research?] Angry Robot Books will publish a 30th anniversary edition of the “seminal” science-fiction novel Vurt from Jeff Noon with a foreword from author Adam Roberts. Jeff Noon’s Vurtappeared from nowhere and suddenly everyonein the British sf community seemed to be reading it – and the novel also enthused and excited North American and Australian audiences too. A very local novel was a global cult. Wenaus’ authoritative account reminds me why we got so excited.”(Andrew M. Butler, Chair of Judges, Arthur C. Clarke Award) No matter what the shortcomings are this book is so bold that it needs to be read to be appreciated. I hope that as I progress further into this series that I will come to love it. This book probably warrants a reread at a later date. 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 )