Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy. What The Hell Ever Happened To... Jeff Noon? - An update on Jeff's current projects as of November 2011 from the author himself. 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 Curious Yellow. Hailed as the novel that reinvented cyberpunk, The 30th Anniversary edition of Jeff Noon's award winning cult classic, Vurt. Set in a distorted, near-future Manchester, Jeff Noon’s novel tells the story of Scribble’s quest for his sister and lover, Desdemona, who he has lost in the Vurt. The Vurt is an alternative (or virtual/vurtual) reality which can serves as a metaphor for drug-induced visions, cyberspace, and perhaps the human imagination itself. Access to the Vurt is achieved through imbibing different coloured feathers laced with manufactured dreams. Scribble, a member of a gang of self-styled renegades called the Stash Riders, seeks the elusive, illegal, and highly dangerous feather known as Curious Yellow for it is only by accessing the higher realms of Vurt that he can hope to rescue Desdemona.

Noon is said to take his inspiration from music. While working on Pollen, he often listened to ‘Dream of a 100 Nations’ album by Transglobal Underground on repeat.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?] Noon describes Automated Alice as a "trequel" - it is a companion piece of sorts to Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The novella follows Alice's journey to a future Manchester populated by Newmonians, Civil Serpents and a vanishing cat named Quark. 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. Another interesting thing about Vurt is the way exposition is handled throughout. Instead of being handled by long narration or context or advertisements, the world-specific exposition is handled through the dispatches from Game Cat strewn throughout the book. The Cat is incredible knowledgeable about the world, and their exposition throughout helps to fill in the missing pieces about vurts, the various races of future Manchester, allowing the reader to better understand what's going on. And even with Game Cat offering a look at the various things going on in Manchester and the world outside of it, there's a reason why so much of the world is left undescribed, and that is for the simple reason that neither Scribble nor any of his friends really care about the world being described. To them, what's important is the vurt and rescuing Scribble's sister/lover. Drugs are amazing plot devices and how Noon plays with the idea in a minimalistic setting, just using strange protagonists with weird ideologies keen on getting hooked on as hard and extreme as possible, possibly reflecting about stuff I don´t know or care about, and generally creating a disturbing and somewhat meta work that has no similar literary equivalent, it´s just so strange that one doesn´t really know what to think about this piece after finishing it.

In High Anxieties, a book exploring the modern concept of addiction, Scribble is used as an example of a character who has traded addiction for a chance at transcendence. Brodie et al. liken Scribble's incorporation of Vurt technology into his biological body as a metaphor for the revelation potentially gained through drug use. They point out that the exchange rate between the real and the Vurt is tempered by Hobart's Constant, or "H"—which is "not incidentally", Brodie argues, "slang for heroin." [7]He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion, 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. 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 ]