SOURCE: A review of Vurt, in Locus, Vol. 33, No. 3, September, 1994, p. 21.

[In the review below, Miller lauds Noon's use of language in Vurt.]

[In Jeff Noon's Clarke Award-winner Vurt, we're] amongst the Stash Riders, a bunch of druggy kids on the dole in near-future Manchester UK, scruffy, unromanticized, as aimlessly amoral as the worst of Kress's Livers and considerably less picturesque than [William] Gibson's usual cyberpunk lowlives. The virtual reality that gives the book its title is the world of a strange drug (taken in the form of a feather), rather than a realm accessed by computer. The cybernetic element here is the prevalence of robots and cyborged humans with random bits of tech in them—human/machine combinations just as seedy as the ordinary humans, as sad, as hungry for the dreams that only Vurt can provide. Even Gibson's hackers would seem a more energetic variety of...