I'm imagining the author of this book dropped a lot of acid. Or something of that sort.Because nobody imagines a world like this without having done such.So, part of this novel is in the real world, part of it is in a Vurt--a multiplayer hallucination that's actually sort of real and induced by drugs that manifest as a feather that one puts in one's mouth. One can be in a metavurt--a vurt within a vurt. There are shadow beings. There are crusties--hippie types--who go for the more peaceful drugs--the main two being intertwined by letting their hair grow together. They are in love.There are flesh cops and shadow cops and vurt cops and they are all out to get the Stash Riders and killing them is good.Scribble has a quest to save his sister, Desdemona. He lost her in a vurt. He loves her. Incest is beautiful. And there's his best friend The Beetle, who goes worldweary and indulges in a Tapewormer vurt that doesn't let you want to jerk out.There's Mandy, the new girl. And Twinkle, the young kid. Both of whom grow to be Stash Riders.And there's the dog people who Bridget falls in with and half-dog, half-vurt, half-shadow creatures and dogshit everywhere.And there's the Thing, the Vurt creature who went real-world in exchange for Desdemona who was lost in the yellow feather. Eat of his flesh, and you are ingesting pure vurt.And this is nonlinear fiction--the same tale is retold with different characters and there are flashbacks and flashforwards and within a vurt one narrative transforms to another.Some vurts are legal, some are for porn, some are for information--General Sniffing runs a menu-driven vurt to protect Hobart but he allows you to see the Game Cat, if the Game Cat wants to see you.And this is meta-fiction, every few chapters, the Game Cat provides a column from the newspaper describing the newest feathers as if he's a modern day, vurt-world Aldous Huxley.And yeah, there's even a plot of sorts. And Scribbles writes, and catalogs the experiences.Stylistically, at points he's stream of consciousness Ken Kesey like as he loses control, or it's a frantic action scene all in sentence fragments, or it's a paranoid delusional scene with all out to get you and many things interrelating with long sentences with lots of commas, à la Thomas Pyncheon. Noon borrows from the beats, from the post-moderns, and from everything in-between. Echoes of Don Delillo. Echoes of William Gibson. Echoes of late period Phillip K. Dick.All enmeshed into something original, frightening and beautiful. A wild ride. A ride worth taking. The book that generated an upsurge in US sales of the Manchester A to Z as American readers puzzled over the plethora of streetnames in Noon's utterly compelling urban sci-fi. Noon presents a near-future society where gene-enhanced dogs are sentient and high-tech 'feathers' offer addictive virtual experiences. Featuring a cast of underclass youths feeding their feather addiction through crime, this could be seen as a sci-fi take on Trainspotting, if it wasn't a hundred times better.
What do You think about Wurt (1993)?
One of the most captivating, unputdownable books I have ever read.
—Lynnie
Honestly not sure what I think about this. A very odd book.
—krissyt72
Trippy book, interesting take on virtual reality.
—netch
