Vurt

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A Man of Shadows is set in a bizarre city, half of which is perpetually illuminated and half of which is entirely dark. As Nyquist investigates the disappearance of a young woman from a prominent family, Noon punctuates the chapters with excerpts from a fictional guide to the city. Storyville, the setting of The Body Library, is a place where the line between fiction and reality is less porous than simply nonexistent; it’s also a locale with places named after Agatha Christie and Italo Calvino, among others. And Creeping Jenny, the latest installment, finds Nyquist visiting Hoxley-on-the-Hale, a town with a strange system of ritual worship and a wealth of folk horror tropes. Adding to this is another huge problem: Pacing. Pollen, as a book, never seems to get to where it wants to go, and certainly not where it needs to go. I'm reminded of the concept of the "idiot plot", a plot where, if everyone's brain was working the way it was supposed to, the plot could be solved in a manner of moments. Pollen's plot is a lot like this. The objectives are very easy, and not much stands in the way. The one thing that does stand in the way is the increasingly convoluted plot that doesn't seem to care much where it's going or why. It takes the shape of a film noir-- one of the narrators even goes from a first-person viewpoint-- but that doesn't really help things. When nothing is explained, and when there's still no one who knows what in God's name is going on, you don't have a good noir. You have a sub-par attempt to do David Lynch or someone equally as mind-screwy. Coupled with a plot that goes absolutely nowhere, this makes for a slow book, where everything should be going somewhere, but just...isn't. Vurt started with a cool premise. A future Manchester UK filled with an assortment of new species of human, a new social structure, and, the central feature of the book, a new drug/game/escape from reality called vurt. Creeping Jenny takes a subtle swerve in its last quarter, maintaining its sense of folk horror but embracing a kind of speculative element as well. One character refers to the idea of the saints as “a sort of computational device.” This device, then, might serve some higher purpose: “a way of forcing us to experience many different kinds of behavior, a lot of it extreme in nature, on a regular basis, year after year.” It still showcases the world of dreams, a doggy world, men and women of shadow, androids, and plant people. :) It's still weird fiction, but it's also literary. I've never seen Persephone become a bad guy. And so many literary characters (and movie stars) dragged out of the dream to walk reality. :)

Did one miss something, shouldn´t there be much more explanation with exposition and worldbuilding, is this just high brow blown up entertainment or something really deep? I don´t know, I can´t say, because it´s written in a way that makes it impossible to make certain and definitive evaluations of the quality, I just can´t judge if I don´t know and that hardly ever happens. Cough arrogant Austrian cough

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. For something that was written '95, it has all the spirit of Gaiman's Sandman and the spunk of the best metafiction and the verve of what is now called the New Weird. :) He's definitely on the forefront of it all. This isn't a book. It's an A1, tip-top, clubbing, jam fair. It's sandwich of fun, on ecstasy bread, wrapped up in a big bag like disco fudge... At most stages of decomposition, they are not dangerous, they are such pariahs, but immediately after the death of a zombie, it may well be possible to snare a living woman and she will give birth to a shadow baby from him. Shadowmen have an increased capacity for empathic perception and are not affected by Wirth feathers. What the hell is this? Yes, it's still a curiosity, something like portals to many virtual worlds, the pass to which is a pen taken in the mouth (not what you thought, although it will also be, and described extremely realistically). Feathers vary in color, shade, size and texture, depending on which the effect on the recipient varies. The part of the population directly connected with Wirth are angels, they also make up the upper level of the local hierarchy, below ordinary people, cybermen (there are also such), shadows, dogs, zombies close the chain. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

Editors Eleanor Teasdale and Simon Spanton acquired world English and audio rights from Michelle Kass at Michelle Kass Associates. The new edition will be published on 10th October 2023. Vivid, restless, street-writing, neon-noir, ranging widely through fantasies and rationalities. An utterly unique, quite brilliant piece of writing.” Lo que sí ha sido es una lectura muy apropiada para la primavera, con mi propia alergia y la de los personajes del libro en plena efervescencia. Jeff Noon’s Vurtappeared from nowhere and suddenly everyonein the British sf community seemed to be reading it – and the novel also enthused and excited North American and Australian audiences too. A very local novel was a global cult. Wenaus’ authoritative account reminds me why we got so excited.”(Andrew M. Butler, Chair of Judges, Arthur C. Clarke Award)que se pueden interpretar como drogas, o como enlaces de red, o como quieras, tampoco se molesta en explicarlo mucho. 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)

The characters. Let’s talk about them for a second. I couldn’t relate to any of them. Perhaps I’m not British enough. Perhaps I haven’t done enough of the right drugs. Perhaps - and I think this may be it - they are just shit. There was a single character I felt a touch more than nothing for and she disappears before the halfway mark only to make a brief and inconsequential appearance toward the end. Awesome.Here, too, identities blur. The young woman at the center of Nyquist’s case turns out to have a twin sister residing in Dusk, a liminal space between the fully lit and fully darkened sections of the city—and one where several laws of reality no longer apply. In The Body Library, where real and fictionalized versions of certain characters exist in tandem and a mysterious illness places words on people’s skin. Here, shifts in demeanor may be more literal than anything else—in the midst of a conversation, Nyquist notes that “[a] new personality was taking over, a new character, and it wasn’t anything good.”