Vurt

This book had sat unread on my shelves for an unfeasible number of years. I approached it with some trepidation because what I remembered of its acquisition was based around what a lot of people with tastes rather different to mine had said about it. This included that it was raw, and new, and streetwise. I was prepared to not be impressed.

Was I wrong about that!

We are in near future Manchester (a city I know slightly), in a scuzzy flat with the Stash Riders - the Beetle, Bridget, Scribble, Mandy and the Thing From Outer Space. Their lives revolve around acquiring and experiencing the street drug of choice - Vurt, absorbed into the body via drug-impregnated feathers which you place in your mouth. If two or more people use the same show more feather at the same time, they experience the same dream-world together.

Scribble lost his sister in the dreamworld some time back, and he's trying to rescue her. This results in an urban odyssey that includes robocrusties, dogrock musicians, dreamsnakes, drug designers and the police (both real and virtual). There is a lot of hallucinatory adventure and plenty of action. The result is similar to Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly, but without the major identity crises. Also, the characters' degree of stonedness doesn't seem quite as extreme as PKD's, though the book is written from Scribble's p.o.v., recounting the story some twenty years later.

The characters are vivid. Are they all likeable? That depends on the reader; personally, I don't find it necessary to like or relate to the characters in a book; there are no guarantees about who you will like or will like you in real life, so why should books be any different? And in real life, there are all possible combinations of how much you like people, and vice versa. Sometimes you find people who you would expect to like, but just fail to connect with on a basic level for no apparent reason. Other times, you meet people who you first intensely dislike, but come to respect because of one quality or another that they possess. Sometimes, you start out in conflict but work through that to friendship. It's called life. This book is rather like that.

But I digress.

Manchester is a pretty big character in this book, and Mancunians will appreciate that. Although written thirty years ago, the book has aged well; there is only one telephone in the novel, and it's a landline. And there is a magazine in the novel that is frequently quoted from and referred to (and whose creator plays a part in the story), and you are free to think of it as a street newspaper, or a fanzine, or a website, or a feed - it doesn't matter which one, because it could be any or all or none of these things and the reader will get the idea. There's a bit of referencing 1980s British media personalities, one of whom is now definitely persona non grata.

The world of this book draws you in, just as the feathers of Vurt do. And I found myself wanting to read more, to the extent that I burned through this in two or three days. Vurt completely exceeded my expectations. I was expecting some angry, post-punk grunge writing with no finesse; I actually found sophisticated, energetic and inventive post-punk grunge writing of considerable quality. show less

This is a hell of a book - sucks you in from the beginning and spits you out after a rollercoster ride through several layers of reality. One of the best books I've read in a while.

On the surface this is a story about an adict's quest to find his lost sister. Underneath it deals with some quite interesting topics like reality denial and addiction, incest, strong father figures, the role of authorities, coming of age...

The prose is somewhat cryptic with a unique lingo throughout the book and the whole setting is not very accessible and remains mysterious which worked nicely for me and added a lot to my feeling of immersion. The book is certainly not easy to read but there is enough action going on to keep you entertained until the end. show more It certainly worked for me - missed my train station to work twice. There is a bit of porn-ish material with transhumans in the end; I thought it ok but it might put some people off.

Overall a book I cannot recommend highly enough, entertaining, intelligent and powerful. Read it and be careful, be very, very careful... show less

I honestly don't what to think about this book.

On the one hand, it's like a jazz festival that mixes Naked Lunch with Trainspotting.

Add an alien feast, nanobot robot cooks, robodogs, The New Weird, and a vast dreamscape that goes from heaven to hell, from arty cafes to cop busts, to licking feathers to get high, to an outright possible reference to Tammuz and Geshtinana with an incestuous bent, and I STILL don't know what to think about this book.

It has a clear jazzy style that jumps all over the place easily, filling in backstory in a fun way, but at the same time, there are so many odd references to a world so alien and just like a drug-filled afternoon, that I can't quite say it was comfortable at all.

And yet it was very creative. I show more loved the virtual meta moments, the way it felt like a mix between Matrix and Strange Days years before those movies were ever made. It also felt like Existenz in a HUGE way. Again, this was written long before that, as well.

So here I am, looking at the genuine article, the haze of the utterly strange and fascinating and brilliant, and I'm wondering if I even like it.

On one hand, I will absolutely respect it and give it major props for existing and to myself for having read it, but I can't say that it was all that pleasant. However, I have also said the same things about China Mieville and Vandermeer, so it may be a tolerance thing and a mood thing rather than an exacting approbation or me being amazed. Of course, I could be both at the same time. :)

Love, and hate. Or beauty and ugliness. My reaction fits quite well with the contents of the book, from imagery to spelled-out themes. So perhaps this was the whole point, to begin with. show less

Light on cyber, heavy on punk. Reads a bit more like Trainspotting than shaking a fist at corpo culture or technological dehumanization (or other common cyberpunk themes), it really comes down to what Vurt really is, which is some kind of blend of a VR experience and a drug, able to be a shared experience or solo, an ad fueled waste of time or alternate reality battle to the death. But the "VR" analogy is too steeped in 90s rave partying to feel like it's saying something relevant to online communities or people lost in game worlds.
Playing loosey goosey with worldbuilding is fine, but if you do then you need to put more into characters and stakes, and while Scribble's 'quest' is well defined it's hard to get excited for it, not knowing show more what's real or imagined in half the shit that happens. In that way it shares a lot of the same problems Philip K Dick stories tend to have. A compelling premise that half the time disappears up its own ass and strategic ambiguity in storytelling becomes indistinguishable from the author having no idea what he's trying to say. Still, it feels just shy of assembling the pieces into something great, maybe a movie adaptation would have the visuals and the big scissors to get at the meat of what's going on here. show less

How abstract are you willing to go? If you're not scared of a little meta then this book is for you. This book takes an LSD trip and combines it with an ever lasting Virtual reality trip. Drugs are administered through feathers, which you almost swallow. That's pretty much the most concrete one can get describing the contents of this novel.

The plot revolves around a writer (Scribble) who loses his sister in an out of control virtual reality drug trip. In exchange he ends up with a being from that reality. In the rest of the book the main character tries to rescue his sister by trading back the alien for his sister. Reading this feels like being chased by sensory overload, as if that could be a monster hunting you.

Vurt is often show more compared to works by William Gibson, but unlike Gibson Jeff Noon actually provides assistance here and there to help you understand the maddening world of the protagonist. It takes effort reading this novel but it's worth it. Once you get used to the language, the character confusions and the reality stretching world descriptions, you're in for quite a trip.

If you can get a hold of a library edition then try that first, although the book is good, it's definitely an acquired taste. show less

This one begs to be read again. I've just gone through it for the first time, and wow, what a trip. It was sort of like Naked Lunch meets Neuromancer meets Perdido Street Station, but I actually liked it better than any of those. You can clearly see some cyberpunk roots here, but this is pure dreampunk. I've got to read the rest of the series now, no question.

I associate Vurt with Snow Crash because they came out around the same time. I was very fortunate to borrow Vurt from a friend who had a British copy of it he'd received from a friend in London. I loved the cover and had no idea what to expect. I started reading it, fell asleep, woke up the next morning and called in sick to work so I could read the book cover-to-cover all at once. It was an amazing reading experience and one of the best roller coaster rides of a book that I ever had. Snow Crash, in comparison, seemed to wish it was Vurt.

At the time of Vurt's publication I was neck-deep in text-based virtual worlds - MUDs and MOOs - and many of the people in my real life had crossed over from my virtual life. I was also an active member show more on the FutureCulture list-serv. We were all doing a lot of thinking about what it meant to have a virtual life and a real life, where the two might meet/meat, and where we thought all of it was going. I'm still close to many of the people I know from then whether I've actually met them in the flesh. I've known lots of these people going on 15 or so years. For me, Vurtcaptured the feel of that time and the not-so-secret desire to be liberated from flesh to play in dreams.

The writing and pacing of this book are pretty flawless to me. Vurtgrabs you by the collar and shoves you into its world running as fast and furious as it can with you bumping along behind. Noon has a very visual writing style, a knack for cyberpunk imagery. The book doesn't differentiate one world from the next as you careen with Scribble, our hero, on his search for the gateway to his sister. You might not approve of the lifestyle choices, but these people are complex and real and I feel like I know them all. All of this remained true on my second read so many years later.

I've recommended this book to lots of people and have given away many copies. One of my favorite reads. show less