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
British novelist Noon debuts with a futuristic tale of a hallucinogenic drug that spins users into virtual worlds. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
William Gibson meets Lewis Carroll in this novel of future England, a time when humans, robots, virtual beings, and their various crossbreeds coexist and, as their primary recreation, indulge in drug-laced feathers that induce a virtual reality state known as "the Vurt." Living on the edges of this strange new world are narrator Scribble and his scruffy gang, the Stash Riders. After a mysterious feather named "Curious Yellow" causes Desdemona, Scribble's sister and lover, to become trapped in the Vurt, Scribble becomes obsessed with rescuing her. His quest for another Curious Yellow takes him on a vertiginous journey through the squalid Manchester streets and deep into the shadowy depths of the Vurt. Humorous, horrific, and wildly original, Vurt is an imaginative triumph. Highly recommended.--Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times
Surreal.


From Booklist
Upon small press publication in the UK, Vurt won kudos as an ingenious 1990s hybrid of A Clockwork Orange and Neuromancer. With its stateside publisher prepping it for major publicity, Noon's first novel seems poised for bestsellerdom. Vurt's twenty-first-century Brit narrator is Scribble, who recounts his days in a ragtag band of junkies, hooked on the black market virtual reality thrills accessible by orally ingesting "vurt feathers." Fueling Scribble's addiction is his search for one particularly lethal feather, labeled "English Voodoo," into whose thrall his sister Desdemona has vanished, perhaps irretrievably. Along the way, Scribble discovers a featherless pipeline to the vurtworlds inside his own bloodstream, lands at the doorstep of a legendary vurt master known as the Game Cat, and almost loses himself to the vurt's seductive pleasures. Although Vurt lacks the hard science foundations of other cyberspace gems and often strays into fantasy, Noon elevates it considerably with penetrating, street-smart prose, an irresistible story line, and strikingly original ideas. Those attractions may win it mainstream as well as sf fans. Carl Hays


From Kirkus Reviews
Noon's hardcover debut transforms the world of virtual reality into ``vurt,'' a playland of psychedelic fantasies anyone can explore without cumbersome helmets or control gloves. Scribble and the Stash Riders are a gang of British punks who regularly steal ``feathers,'' which, when applied to the back of the throat, deliver the user into seedy virtual adventures. But this brave new world of entertainment isn't user-friendly, and when Scribble and his sister Desdemona share a dangerous yellow feather to enjoy incestuous sex, the fantasy ends with the young girl disappearing into a virtual no-man's land while Scribble is left to confront reality alone. The plot, which follows his attempts to rescue his sister from this wonderland of forbidden pleasures, seems as aimless as the Stash Riders' lives: an endless cycle of theft, violence, sex, and vurt. But Scribble's destiny transcends the frequent, bloody clashes between the Stash Riders and the police, because he possesses the ability to enter vurts at will. He switches from one fantasy to another, until the reader is no longer sure what reality is. Desdemona remains unattainable, but Scribble's final confrontation with the creator and supervisors of vurt leads to his own virtual ascension among the future masters of the universe. Like Scribble's feathers, Vurt leads to a wild and kaleidoscopic ride, but fails to entirely satisfy. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Surreal."--the New York Times

"A virtual wonderland."--Vanity Fair

"The mainstreaming of cyberpunk."--the New Yorker



Review
"Surreal."--the New York Times

"A virtual wonderland."--Vanity Fair

"The mainstreaming of cyberpunk."--the New Yorker



Review
"Surreal."--the New York Times

"A virtual wonderland."--Vanity Fair

"The mainstreaming of cyberpunk."--the New Yorker



Book Description
Vurt is a feather--a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colors: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows--the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister. Helped by his gang, the Stash Riders, hindered by shadowcops, robos, rock and roll dogmen, and his own dread, Scribble searches along the edges of civilization for a feather that, if it exists at all, must be bought with the one thing no sane person would willingly give.

ANNOTATION

In futuristic Manchester, England, Scribble has lost his sister to the Vurt--an altered state reached by drugs in different colored feathers. 4 cassettes.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Vurt is a feather—a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colors: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows—the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister. Helped by his gang, the Stash Riders, hindered by shadowcops, robos, rock and roll dogmen, and his own dread, Scribble searches along the edges of civilization for a feather that, if it exists at all, must be bought with the one thing no sane person would willingly give.

FROM THE CRITICS

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. (Feb.)

Library Journal