Did one miss something, shouldn´t there be much more explanation with exposition and worldbuilding, is this just high brow blown up entertainment or something really deep? I don´t know, I can´t say, because it´s written in a way that makes it impossible to make certain and definitive evaluations of the quality, I just can´t judge if I don´t know and that hardly ever happens. Cough arrogant Austrian cough These books, the best books, discover the essential human notes of their times, and they ring so strongly down the decades that we remember them still.”

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. But what Scribble wants is something far beyond what he might be able to feasibly grasp, and it becomes more obvious that whatever game he thinks he is playing, the real board is far more complex and incomprehensible than he understands. Before he can even think of swapping The Thing for his (almost too) beloved sister, Scribble will have to match wits with corrupt cops, brave a den of human-dog hybrids, fight a frighteningly-determined cop with a fractal gun, and finally learn his true nature, something no one is truly aware of.

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The civil serpents (a play-on-words of the job 'civil servant') are trying to control everything that happens in the future, and try to stop randomness. The 'Supreme Serpent' is the controller of the serpents, and hints at the fact that he is Satan himself. So here I am, looking at the genuine article, the haze of the utterly strange and fascinating and brilliant, and I'm wondering if I even like it. 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. It still showcases the world of dreams, a doggy world, men and women of shadow, androids, and plant people. :) It's still weird fiction, but it's also literary. I've never seen Persephone become a bad guy. And so many literary characters (and movie stars) dragged out of the dream to walk reality. :)

A perfect split, straight across the middle. Sometimes it happens like that, once in a thousand matings. He was human from the waist up, dog from the waist down. He placed his fur-covered legs down on the floor, sitting on the bed, with the Karli in his strong arms.” What! How can such a half-half being have come into existence? Are we rumbling through a far distant futuristic England here, as in after nuclear war? No answers are provided; Jeff Noon leave it all to one's imagination. There 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?] Giving up drinking, Noon tried writing sober, and found he was able to: the connection was severed, but it didn't make his work any less peculiar. In Steven Hall's view, "at the end of the 90s, he sort of took over BS Johnson's role as our one-man avant-garde."This is not an easy read as I found it difficult to keep tabs at times and by the nature of the story itself things are not always clear. I applaud this novel and its vision, I just had problems with the characters themselves. I never bonded with or really cared about any of them and that makes it tough to love the book. I ended up skim reading the middle third of this book as things were not holding my interest. For something that was written '95, it has all the spirit of Gaiman's Sandman and the spunk of the best metafiction and the verve of what is now called the New Weird. :) He's definitely on the forefront of it all. 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.... It was a bizarre world – Noon says he is more interested in "subject matter and atmosphere than character and plot" – yet an exuberantly propulsive story ran through it. "There are two drives I have," he says. "One is towards experimentation. The other is towards campfire storytelling."

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. In 2013, 20th anniversary edition of the novel was published, featuring three new stories and a foreword by Lauren Beukes. [19] See also [ edit ] Though he seemed to come out of rave culture, Noon was never himself, as people assumed, part of the Madchester scene. "I was very much an outsider," he says. "I was interested in it but I was never part of it and I never took ecstasy – I've never been that into drugs, apart from alcohol … probably because I know I'm an addictive personality so I'm always trying to control it."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. The three short stories that have been added to this twentieth anniversary edition make only tangential reference to characters from the original novel but they are all finely crafted gems that make welcome additions to Noon’s world building. Vurt offers its readers a host of original visions even as it riffs off the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Like one of Noon’s dream feathers, it is well worth consuming this book for it transports you to a richly imagined world of distorted realities and twisted fantasy. Its highly inventive blend of poetic and grotesque imagery lingers in the mind like the residue of a powerful dream. 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 … " The book has attracted criticism due to its implausible science [8] and "wild and kaleidoscopic" yet unsatisfying plot. [9] Entertainment Weekly felt Vurt was undeserving of receiving the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award, saying the book's "sentimental incest and adolescent self-congratulation ... is never really startling or disturbing." [10] Allusions and references [ edit ] 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.

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.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 ] Pollen is the sequel to Vurt and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the virtual world. When concerning the virtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn). The novel is set in Manchester. Vurt has been described as a retelling of Orpheus' visit to the Underworld. [12] Orpheus and Scribble are both poets and musicians, and each attempts to rescue their idealised lovers from an alternate reality. As Joan Gordon points out, cyberspace represents "the underside of the human condition" and therefore the journey to virtual reality is comparable to the mythic journey to commune with the dead. [13] In addition, the myth of Orpheus, like Vurt, explores what it means to be human in relation to the non-human; Orpheus encountered the dead, and Scribble the virtual simulations created by computers. [14]