What The Hell Ever Happened To... Jeff Noon? - An update on Jeff's current projects as of November 2011 from the author himself.

Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy. The idea of rituals as a kind of vast psychogeographic machine is the sort of grand and bizarre idea that Noon’s work abounds with. The Nyquist novels at times feel like loving tributes to the genres that shaped their author, but they’re also anything but pastiche. Just as Jeff Noon’s fictional investigators probe the boundaries between the real and the surreal, so too is their author venturing into uncharted realms, and finding out what happens when unexpected stories suddenly converge.

First let me say I REALLY wanted to like this book. Hell, there are several reasons why I didn't want to NOT like this book, not the least of which are: But in the end, you should read this book. It's a classic of modern science fiction, it's an amazing, vivid read, and despite its twisted and sometimes brutal nature, it's incredibly readable and well worth your time. Find this. Buy this. It's recently come out in a tenth-anniversary edition with a completely unnecessary introduction by critically-acclaimed Angry Robot mainstay Lauren Beukes. And now, I leave you with one last comment:

No matter what the shortcomings are this book is so bold that it needs to be read to be appreciated. I hope that as I progress further into this series that I will come to love it. This book probably warrants a reread at a later date. 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) 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. Vurt and the books that followed – there was a sequel, Pollen, and a prequel, Nymphomation – elaborated a fluid mythos that combined rave culture, druggy fantasy, intimations of cyberspace, weird maths and overlays of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (an abiding obsession registered in all Noon's books) with classical myth and English folktale.And yet it was very creative. I 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. Noon gave up drinking around 15 years ago, because "I had to" he says. "If you want to know the hideous details, I used to book into hotels – really cheap hotels in Manchester – for a couple of nights. Just buy wine, and orange juice, and aspirin. In 2018, Netflix optioned the rights to Vurt from Ravendesk Entertainment to create a television series, the pilot for which was written by Stranger Things writer/producer, Paul Dichter; however, after more than two years in development, the series was never greenlit for production.

First published in 1993, Jeff Noon’s extraordinary, influential, award-winning novel transcended SF boundaries and resisted categorization. Alluding to noir and surrealism alike, it was defiantly its own thing and remains so thirty years later. Pollen is the sequel to Vurt and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the virtual world. When concerning the virtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn). The novel is set in Manchester. But just as that isn’t quite the cyberspace of William Gibson, neither is Noon precisely a cyberpunk author—the portrait that he paints of England seems to be less of a near future vision and more one of a slightly altered reality, period. It would make for an excellent double bill with Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet—both are books set in a skewed world where all things mythical take on a heightened position, and the delirious manifestations of art resonate on unexpected frequencies. In the case of Vurt, that comes through the dreamlike realm that its characters enter, populated by beings from fiction, mythology, and the collective unconscious. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

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Cobralingus sits apart from Noon's other published works. It is part anthology of poems and part instructional textbook for Noon's style of poetry. In it, he details his regimented methods for the creation of poetic text by a style of word play which lends its name to the title. Also included are various exemplars of this style. A young boy puts a feather into his mouth ... " So, in 1993, began Jeff Noon's first novel, Vurt. It was something the like of which had never been seen before, and it established Noon – then a struggling 35-year-old playwright earning rent by working in the Deansgate branch of Waterstones and writing at night – as a figure of major promise in British science fiction. It´s definitively not that beat poet, beatnik generation road trip garbage, far better, because one notices the competence of the author who is, if his biography is correct, more high on literature than mind altering hallucinogens, but again, what is it? I guess everyone has to find out on her/his own and it would interest me if the bad rating of some of his other works are because of the complexity of what he writes or because he finally came too close to fantastic realism and poisoned his art like many before him.