Vurt

Rating:
Summary: Surreal, all encompassing
Review: After you go through VURT, you wonder what the point of this book is. Noon makes you make your own meaning of this book. Vurt asks questions, ones that can never be answered. It is a definite read. Number 3 on my list.

Rating:
Summary: Jeff Noon Supremo!
Review: This is a real tour de force , displaying a linguistic and intellectual athleticism rarely found in modern literature. Totally unique and compelling. You must read all his works to appreciate one of today's finest writers.

Rating:
Summary: My personal Opinion
Review: I am not one to enjoy science future fiction, but seeing that Jeff Noon is a well known British author I thought perhaps I might give it a try. "Vurt" is wonderfully written with a slow start but a fast pacing climax all the way throughout the book. I was very impressed with Jeff Noon's ability to capture jealousy, anger and fear within the characters. This is partly the reason that I staid with the book until it's end.

Rating:
Summary: cyperpunk thriller falls back on violence for lack of ideas
Review: With all the hype and reviews of this book, I was expecting a cross between William Gibson and Willian Burroughs. Instead, its more like a cross of Gibson and Stephen King. While having a good concept to work with, i.e. virtual reality drug/software distributed in feathers, it sort of runs out of ideas when it actually gets into the virtual world. It falls back on cheap horror thrills, lots of blood and violence, while trying to build up credibility with alot of tough street talk. This is a pretty good sci-fi thriller with a weird incest angle, but hardly in the league of Neil Stephenson or even Gibson. When it comes to describing altered states, this guy is an amateur compared to Burroughs. And unlike Burroughs, the writing style in nothing revolutionary.

Rating:
Summary: One of the very few writers breaking new ground
Review: A truly immense work of imagination. Set in a Manchester that the Legge bill clearly never reached. The human race has evolved into an admixture of weird beings - half Crustie, half Alsation - centred around a mythic Lost Domaine landscape reached via the ingestion of Vurt - totally feathered up. A fin de siecle Castaneda / Huxley hybrid of a novel that you will still be reading long after Mary Ann Hobbs has gone to bed. Daily Mail readers will find this book deeply offensive and frightenly subversive - Curious Yellow's favourite book of 1996. 'A blue feather had landed on the stomach of the The Thing From Outer Space. One of his tentacles reached out for it. His spiky fingers took a hold, and a hole opened up in his flesh, a greasy orifice. He turned the feather and then stroked it in, direct, to the hole. He started to change . I wasn't sure which feather he'd loaded, but from the way he was moving his feelers I guess he was swimming with the Thermo Fish.'

Rating:
Summary: An outstanding debut
Review: Remarkable. Noon blows the doors off of the stagnating genre of science-fiction with this debut. It contains the familiar elements of a cyberpunk novel, but Noon creates his prose with fuzzy hallucinogenic halos and psychedelic colours (oh that Curious Yellow!). Kind of like William Gibson on acid. Noon doesn't just break the rules, he pulverizes them, establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers to hit the sf scene in a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Something of a non-entity of a book.
Review: In many ways, science-fiction is the hardest of all the fictions to write well, because you really must create a believable world, and unfortunately, Vurt does not do this. Vurt is somewhat slow and at times dull, with the occosional bizarre use of E.E Cummings style word layout proving only an irritation, leaving no real impression after reading, which, if anything, is the true sign of a book failing

Rating:
Summary: AN ALTERNATE REALITY
Review: I can still picture the people in Jeff Noon's Vurt world. I can call to mind entire scenes, in vivid color. Conversations, smells, the feel of vurt flesh - these are a part of my memories. I took a trip to another world, honest, I was there! ( It's not the kind of vacation I'd tell my mom about but I'd book the next trip out!

Rating:
Summary: Altered States
Review: This book isn't just warped, it's truly bent. For those seeking an altered state of consciousnes, try reading this book straight through. Absorbing, clear and forceful, the story pushes readers into the action from the moment they begin reading, not letting up until the back cover is closed. Read this book and you'll be thinking of feathers for days afterward

Rating:
Summary: Awesome sci-fi/psychedelic novel of a not-so-distant future
Review: This terrific book is a must read. It deals with a type of drug known as "Vurt" It comes in the form of feathers that you put in your mouth. There are different colors with different subjects, some totally legal, some totally illegal and next-to-impossible to find. The story opens with a group of thrill-seeking Vurt takers, The "Stash Riders" I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!