Product Description

Take a trip in a stranger's head. Along rainshot streets with the stash riders, a posse of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine ...Vurt feathers ...But as the Game Cat says, Be careful, be very careful. This ride is not for the weak ...Scribble isn't listening. He has to find his lost love. A journey towards the ultimate, perhaps even mythical, Vurt Feather ...Curious Yellow. 'Passionate, distinctive, demanding and enthralling'. - "The Times". 'Too beautiful for bikers, too harsh for hippies'. - "New Stateman and Society". 'Bold and accomplished ...It screams out to be read'. - "City Life". 'Refreshing, disturbing and original'. - "Independent".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36927 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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.

Review
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. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Take a trip in a stranger's head. Along rainshot streets with the stash riders, a posse of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine ...Vurt feathers ...But as the Game Cat says, Be careful, be very careful. This ride is not for the weak ...Scribble isn't listening. He has to find his lost love. A journey towards the ultimate, perhaps even mythical, Vurt Feather ...Curious Yellow. 'Passionate, distinctive, demanding and enthralling'. - "The Times". 'Too beautiful for bikers, too harsh for hippies'. - "New Stateman and Society". 'Bold and accomplished ...It screams out to be read'. - "City Life". 'Refreshing, disturbing and original'. - "Independent".

Customer Reviews

Vurtual feathers
Vurt is an odd beast. I found it hard to start with, but soon the world had sucked me in. In futuristic Manchester those looking for hallucinogenic experiences suck on feathers to enter virtual worlds, Vurts. Stash Riders, a bunch of miscellaneous losers, hunt for interesting feathers and try to find Desdemona, who got stuck in a bad Vurt.

Noon has cooked up a futuristic and surrealistic world. The language is colourful and takes some getting used to. The world isn't explained thoroughly; some readers will certainly find Vurt too strange a feather to swallow. However, if you can accept that the world doesn't always make sense, the story moves on with a good pace and the plot is interesting.

Vurt isn't the easiest and most accessible book, but it's worth the effort. If you like it, there's more: Noon has written several books set in the same vurtual world.

So much potential, but it didn't quite do it for me
The first half of this book absolutely blew me away, I thought it was one of the most incredible things I'd ever read, I got through it in a couple hours and was hungry for more. Then I came to Part 2, and suddenly I felt like I'd spoken too soon.

I really would love if someone could explain to me what on earth the section where they go into the world of the dogs is actually about, how it relates to anything else in the story, why it's there, or why it's interesting - and I don't say that sarcastically, I really do want to know, because I was LOVING this book up until that section.

I also started going off it when it became all about his incestuous relationship with his sister, not because I'm a prude but because the subject of incest felt like it was there simply for shock value and nothing more and I just thought it seemed irrelevant.

Then it built back up again and was breaktaking for me, again, and I was hopeful that, over all, I'd be in love with this book - but then it just ended. Again, can someone please explain to me what on earth happened at the end? Did the book actually conclude? Because I thought the ending was a total cop-out, it felt like he'd created such an ambitious fantasy world, he didn't know what to do with it, and I just don't like when books go with the 'safe' denouement of 'well, it's all over now, so-and-so is doing this now, and the last time i saw person x he was busy with this, and I'm here doing this thing blah blah the end'. The summary was just so cheesy and empty and dissatisfying, I felt SO disappointed, particularly because, as I say, I really did expect to be blown away by this novel.

Possibly life changing?
I am a student, and we were mucking about in the libary at lunch one wet break - and i saw this book in the shelf and picked it out due to the versions random colour scheme. I read the blurb and thought it sounded ok. I started reading...

When i finished it a few weeks later (i'm a slow reader...) i new it was the best book i had ever read. It's perfect mix of violence, sex, futuristic drugs, and an incredibly emotional and heart-pounding, creative and immaginative story just blew me away.

I talked my friends into reading it, who read all the time and finished it within a day or two, and they decided it was their favoutite book too. Now, two years later, the book has become a bit of a legend, almost a bible, too all that have read it.

This book appeals to both people looking for a cool story, and those looking for a masterpiece. If you read it, you will agree i can assure.

Jeff Noon is the Jeff Beck of the writing world!