Product Description

In the last years of his life, the fantasist, Lewis Carroll, wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody. It has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future. That's not quite true. "Automated Alice" was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book, he sends Alice through a clock's workings. She travels through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England. Oh dear, that's not at all right. This trequel to "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too...a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #170017 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jeff Noon's previous novels, Vurt and Pollen, have attracted a cult following with their psychedelic science fiction creation of the realm of "Vurt"--a region defined by illusion, dream and drug-induced fantasy. Noon has now decided to link up with an imaginative precursor by introducing Lewis Carroll's Alice as the protagonist in a new adventure that draws on Carroll's through-the-looking-glass inversions of reality, and adds a Jeff Noon menace and edginess absent from Carroll's Wonderland. Alice finds herself in 1998 Manchester when she enters an old grandfather clock, and soon becomes the prime suspect in the puzzling "Jigsaw Murders." Noon emulates Carroll's crazy wordplay throughout, and even adds his own illustrations inspired by those of John Tenniel, the famous interpreter of Alice.

From the Publisher
reviews
'Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid' Arena

'Destined for cult status…Cyberpunk at the cutting edge' Maxim

'Captures Carroll's style effortlessly…A weird Alice with a contemporary edge' Mail on Sunday

'A wild psychedelic vision…' Manchester Evening News

From the Back Cover
In the last years of his life, Lewis Carroll wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published and has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.

That's not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs, who sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in Manchester at the end of the Twentieth century.

Oh dear, that's not at all right. Zenith O'Clock is a character invented by Jeff Noon, who really wrote this trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too...a series of skewed misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.

Customer Reviews

A fantastic `trequel'
`Automated Alice' is simultaneously a `trequel' [sic] to Lewis Carroll's two `Alice' books and Jeff Noons earlier `Vurt' novels, following the adventures of Alice as she climbs through a clock's workings and gets transported into fantastic adventures in modern day Manchester. Taken purely as an adult sequel to `Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and `Through The Looking-Glass' this is a fantastic achievement, with Noon brilliantly aping Lewis Carroll's style and sharing a love of puns, wordplay and nonsense with Harry Trumbore's internal illustrations matching the style of Tenniel's original pictures. Noon has great fun introducing Alice to such modern day concepts as computers and quantum mechanics while skewing things in typically nonsensical fashion (so civil servants become Civil Serpents while the Cheshire Cat is transformed into a chameleonic Quark) while the device of Alice hunting down missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle drives the story in much the same way as the chess game drives `Through the Looking-Glass'.

When read as a sequel to Noon's earlier shared-world novels `Vurt' and `Pollen' however the book takes on an additional resonance, with Alice's earlier appearance in `Pollen' given additional background while the plotline takes in the `disease' responsible for the merging of humans and animals in the Noon's future world, with plenty of sly winks towards the feather-accessed Vurt.

Read either way this is a fantastic novel, filled with bizarre imagery, wordplay and metafiction, but to really get the most from it you should read both Noon and Carroll's earlier works first.

Noon for the masses...
I love Noon's stuff, it's as simple as that, but then his novels work in a similar way to my brain. As a great fan of his work, I've tried to pass on his books to many of my friends, only to have the books returned to me with accompanying quizical looks. Automated Alice on the other hand is a book that I have passed around and had returned by smiley faced friends. For those that want the full experience, I'd suggest starting with Vurt and work your way up to Alice..., for those of you seeking instant gratification, go for it, you won't regret it!

Superb!
(to properly describe this novel I will have to use 'surreal' twice in the first sentence) it for This surreal, oh so very surreal novel from that crazy nutter that brought us the book 'Vurt', comes an effective, interesting novel. Noon captures Carrol's opiate vision and expands upon it for the LSD generation. Less dark and sinister than I expected, and don't let the blurbs description of 1998 Manchester make you think this is a modern version of Alice in Wonderland, as its talking zebra's and saxaphone playing slugs all round. Sometimes Noon looses it slightly and turns to inane, Beetle video imagery to convey feelings of a trip, but hey, they were all completely stoned weren't they?