Vurt

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Game Cat – the maestro, the near mythical being who knows and shares the inside info in his "Game Cat" periodical

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. 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. 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. Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, haunt the streets of an alternate Manchester, chasing the immersive highs that come from Vurt Feathers. Place a feather in your mouth and it takes you to the another place, a trip, a shared reality of all our dreams and mythologies.

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. 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 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) Vivid, restless, street-writing, neon-noir, ranging widely through fantasies and rationalities. An utterly unique, quite brilliant piece of writing.”

Here, too, identities blur. The young woman at the center of Nyquist’s case turns out to have a twin sister residing in Dusk, a liminal space between the fully lit and fully darkened sections of the city—and one where several laws of reality no longer apply. In The Body Library, where real and fictionalized versions of certain characters exist in tandem and a mysterious illness places words on people’s skin. Here, shifts in demeanor may be more literal than anything else—in the midst of a conversation, Nyquist notes that “[a] new personality was taking over, a new character, and it wasn’t anything good.” In Pollen, that conflict manifests itself as a conflict between stories and reality—including the quasi-mythological figure of John Barleycorn, who emerges as the closest thing the novel has to an antagonist. This ultimately brings Pollen’s conclusion to a metafictional level—or, as a colleague of Sybil’s tells her as they race in search of an answer, they’ve begun to move in a realm governed by narrative dimensions rather than physical ones. “Forget about distance and direction,” he tells her. “We’ve got to find the narrative connection.” By structuring these works along the lines of detective fiction—a familiar genre if ever there was one—Noon is also able to pull off an impressive touch. Vurt set in motion the same motif that Noon would explore in rapidly changing forms over the last few decades: one in which two disparate views of reality come into conflict, leading to altered perceptions and chaos. 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 Engine begins with Noon using an existing text and then applying different 'filter gates' that edit the text into something new. Examples of these gates include 'enhance' which creates elements of beauty in the text, and 'ghost edit'; this kills the text and calls up a ghost to haunt the text. Jeff Noon says Vurt originally began as an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden, an anti-authoritarian novel written at the turn of the 20th century. Noon, recently exposed to virtual reality technology by the magazine Mondo 2000, depicts the torture garden as a virtual world. Noon also credits Joseph Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces for inspiring the narrative structure of Vurt. [1] The world of Slow Motion Ghosts is one where alternate personas, rituals, and parallel subcultures all factor into the plotline in various ways. Lucas Bell was best-known for his onstage persona, known as “King Lost.” This, in turn, ties in with references from Lucas’s past to a mysterious place known as “Edenville,” which may or may not exist. A group of musicians debates an act that would “conjure up Luke’s spirit”—one of several moments in the novel where Noon suggests the presence of supernatural activity. 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. 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]