Vurt

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.

Vurt is a feather - a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colours: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows - the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister. Helped by his gang, the Stash Riders, hindered by shadowcops, robos, rock and roll dogmen, and his own dread, Scribble searches along the edges of civilization for a feather that, if it exists at all, must be bought with the one thing no sane person would willingly give.

Jeff Noon has been a pop musician (guitarist with Manicured Noise), a painter (exhibited as part of the Northern Young Contemporaries) and a playwright. His first play, Woundings, won The Mobil Playwriting Competition, and he was subsequently playwright in residence at The Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester. He was also winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award 1995.