Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Vurt
Summary
Vurt is a 1993 science fiction novel written by British author Jeff Noon. The debut novel for both Noon and small publishing house Ringpull, 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.
Scribble – the protagonist and first-person narrator
Desdemona – Scribble's sister
Beetle – the driver, muscle, and unofficial leader of the Stash Riders
Bridget – shadowgirl, fellow Stash Rider, Beetle's lover, and powerful psychic
Mandy – the newest addition to the Stash Riders
The Thing From Outer Space – a creature from the Vurt-world
Game Cat – the maestro, the near mythical being who knows and shares the inside info in his "Game Cat" periodical
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.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.