Vurt [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

If you like literary 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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .

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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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 -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.