Vurt [Hardcover]

Jeff Noon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 1995

"As hip and breathless as William Gibson, but spiced with dark humor and the horrible realisation that Noon knows of what he writes....Vurt is passionate, distinctive, demanding and enthralling--first-time novelist Noon has started with a bang."--The London Times.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you like challenging science fiction, then Jeff Noon is the author for you. Vurt, winner of the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke award, is a cyberpunk novel with a difference, a rollicking, dark, yet humorous examination of a future in which the boundaries between reality and virtual reality are as tenuous as the brush of a feather.

But no review can do Noon's writing justice: it's a phantasmagoric combination of the more imaginative science fiction masters, such as Phillip K. Dick, genres such as cyberpunk and pulp fiction, and drug culture.

If this tickles your fancy, you should definitely consider the sequel to Vurt, Pollen, or Noon's lighter and more accessible Automated Alice, a modern recasting of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

From Publishers Weekly

Noon's highly stylized, virtual-reality inspired first novel has won raves and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in Britain, eliciting comparisons to William Gibson, Anthony Burgess and Lewis Carroll, among others. But though it is original, vivid and powerful, it's not as revolutionary as the fanfare suggests. Noon gives us a future (or perhaps just other) Manchester, England, where nearly everyone is hooked on "Vurts"-hallucinogenic designer drugs, administered with feathers, that send users into virtual worlds. Vurt isn't any old future drug, though; these worlds have a reality of their own. Users can meet up in them and share the experience, and they can even "exchange" objects or people and bring Vurt items back to the "real" world. Scribble, a member of a small gang of "young hip malcontents," the Stash Riders, has lost his beloved sister, Desdemona (don't ask how beloved if you're shy about incest), to a black-market Vurt, getting in return a shapeless alien he dubs "The Thing-from-Outer Space." Determined to find another copy of the "English Voodoo" Vurt in order to return and trade the Thing back for his sister, Scribble and his pals score illegal Vurts, run from the cops, fight among themselves, trip out on feathers, kill a cop, go to ground, become estranged and regroup. Some die, and all suffer, before Scribble gets his chance. Noon keeps a brisk pace, with the many Vurt-trip sequences, awash in Alice in Wonderland-like images, never so long or involved as to bog the story down. His bizarre, psychedelic future feels like no other, and the startling alloy of pseudoheroic genrespeak and neo-Beat freewheeling rhythms proves a unique and perfect medium for such a hallucinatory tale. There's little of Gibson or Burgess here, though. The story has neither the shock value of A Clockwork Orange nor the cyberpunk nihilism of Neuromancer. Noon takes his material (though not his characters) less seriously than Burgess, Gibson and most other SF writers. His future world isn't meant to be believable, or even cautionary, but merely colorful and engaging (which it is)-and that takes some of the bite out of the book. Nevertheless, this is an audacious fantasia, exhibiting a narrative daring and command few new writers can boast, sweeping the reader along as though it were a Vurt feather-trip itself. 75,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Crown (January 17, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517599910
• ISBN-13: 978-0517599914
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (105 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Feather Full of Dreams, April 13, 2003

By 

"rhaeve" (Berea, KY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vurt (Paperback)

"A young boy puts a feather into his mouth..."

From the first sentence of the book, I was drawn in. I forced myself to read only one chapter at a time, to actually consider what I'd read and let it sink in, and that made this book that much richer. To me, it heralded back to Clockwork Orange. The Stash Riders (made up of Scribble, Beetle, Mandy, and Bridget) have their own vocabulary grown from the world they inhabit - where feathers can hold their fondest dreams or worst nightmares, where the worst poison comes from dreamsnakes, where pure is poor, and where shadowcops lurk above every all-night Vurt-U-Want.

Scribble is a young man, not so out of the ordinary, who wants nothing more than to have his sister back again. That want drives him to a destiny he'd not even considered, gaining and losing almost everything in the process.

I'm enamoured with this book. It stays on my nightstand so I can hear Scribble tell his story whenever I want. Let Jeff Noon take you into his tangibly ethereal world.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rock-N-Roll Sci Fi, March 23, 2006

By 

Piper Pneumatic (Birmingham, AL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vurt (Paperback)

I LOVED this book. It's unlike any other science fiction book...or any book for that matter...that I've ever read. Jeff Noon writes in such a way that whether you want to be or not, you're swept up in the book's quick pace. It's fun...like a chocolate sunday (okay I am a girl!)... and it's deliciously weird. It take a few pages to get in tune with his way of writing, which is part of the fun, and when you do it's a roller coaster ride. I didn't want it to end! Not only is it fun, but actually has a really interesting plot and keeps you guessing till the end. I would highly recommend it! :)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A feather in your mouth:, July 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Vurt (Paperback)

Vurt, by Jeff Noon is one of the most creative books that I have read in the sf&f world. It seems almost like a combo of A Clockwork Orange (the way Jeff Noon invents words, deriving them from words already in existance; also the all night Vurt-You-Want is analagous to the Korova Milkbar), Neuromancer (the general style of writing, cyberpunk theme), and Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland (the sort of mysticism that surrounds the plot, how a child is chasing down something that seems trivial to others, how he encounters a strage and almost magical world, paralelling to reality), and finally of Tekwar (the theme deals with the solicitation of drugs that don't exist in the non fiction world, and the battling that goes along with them). The plotline is very simple when you strip it of detail, which is part of why it becomes such an intriguinging, such a simple plotline bears such a complex plot. I think that Jeff Noon did a commendable job on his first book, and look ! forward to reading more books by him.