SOURCE: "Inventive Vurt: Getting High and Lost in Cyberland," in The Boston Globe, February 3, 1995, p. 50.

[In the following positive assessment of Vurt, Powers argues that the novel breaks new ground in the genre of "cyberpunk" fiction and praises Noon's pacing, "visual style," and focus on music.]

In the future—as in the past—there will be drugs. Lots of them. In the future of Jeff Noon's first novel, Vurt, bands of youths moving to techno-trance and occasional punk beats will devote their lives and deaths to drugs, determined to slip through cracks in this world to a separate reality, searching for continually different and higher highs.

Scribble is one of them. His friends (gang is too strong a word, they're after highs, not money or A Clockwork Orange ultraviolence) call themselves the Stash Riders, and they have just scored some non-legal vurt. But a shadow-cop has spotted them...