Vurt
Cover of uncorrected proof
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| Author | Jeff Noon |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Joe Magee |
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Series | Vurt series |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Published | 1993 (Ringpull) |
| Media type | print (paperback and hardback), audiobook |
| ISBN | (first edition, paperback) |
| OCLC | 30734475 |
| Followed by | Pollen |
Vurt is a 1993 science fiction novel written by British author Jeff Noon. Both Noon and small publishing house Ringpull's debut novel, it went on to win the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was later listed in The Best Novels of the Nineties.
Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his "gang", the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester, England, in which society has been shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug/shared alternate reality, accessed by sucking on colour-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become "real".
Before the novel begins, Scribble and his sister take a shared trip into a vurt called English Voodoo, but upon awakening Scribble finds his sister has disappeared. Out of that trip comes an amorphous semi-sentient blob which Mandy, a fellow Stash Rider, nicknames "The Thing from Outer Space". From that point on, Scribble is on a mission to find a rare and contraband Curious Yellow feather so that he might find his sister.
Vurt achieved both critical and commercial success, attracting praise from the science fiction community as well as the literary arena. It has been stylistically compared to William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, as well as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
In High Anxieties, a book exploring the modern concept of addiction, Scribble is used as an example of a character who has traded addiction for a chance at transcendence. Brodie et al. liken Scribble's incorporation of Vurt technology into his biological body as a metaphor for the revelation potentially gained through drug use. They point out that the exchange rate between the real and the Vurt is tempered by Hobart's Constant, or "H"—which is "not incidentally", Brodie argues, "slang for heroin."
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