Vurt (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Mandy- came out of the all-night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies..." (more)
Key Phrases: sniffing general, platt fields, curious yellow, Game Cat, English Voodoo, Stash Riders (more...)

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st Amer & hardback ed edition (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 (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,058,775 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #6 in

  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( N ) > Noon, Jeff

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is only for some (Glorious for some), February 24, 2001

By	"distorto_tech" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vurt (Paperback)

Please don't read Vurt if you are a sub-culture literature snob. And don't read it if you are a Sci-Fi elitist. And if you like to intellectualize the merit of a work against the established canon (even if that canon is considered cultish or underground or whatever) or critique it within a particular lineage, please stay clear of this book.

I can see why this book is not for all. I can even relate with the negative reviews it has been receiving on this web site. If I were to remove myself from the emotional and the more intuitive responses this novel evokes in me, I too might label it drug-obsessed and not the most original; or the writing style somewhat pretentious and over-the-top.

But, whether because I stem from a culture of electronic music, psychedelic drugs, and crusty fashion or because I tend to romanticize everything in life to death, this book has captured and moved me deeply.

So please, read this book if you too are a dreamer, like me. And read it if you've ever found yourself looking over that field of shattered glass, like an illusion gleaming, hiding the scum and the stench of Anytown-Bottletown, hoping for something better. Searching for a reality more satisfying than this, because you've always known this world is not your own. Linking the hunger with sexual love then discovering (in letting it go) that the insatiability goes far beyond.

It's about escape. This book is a momentary escape.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hyperreal wonderland, April 1, 2005

By	Cappy "Sarah" (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vurt (Paperback)

Noon catapults the reader into world in which the boundaries between dreams and reality have collapsed. The unreal becomes more real than the real. A hypnotizing adventure, I read it in a single spellbound sitting. I cannot recommend this book enough. Inspired.

8 of 8 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.