In which two men enter and one frisky little blog post leaves…

With his feather-frazzled early fictions (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice and Nymphomation), Jeff Noon presented the world with a distinctly British (no, wait – English!) version of cyberpunk – one that side-stepped all those designer shades and phallic head jacks in favour of something that was a little bit less ashamed of its fantastical status. In his short stories (Pixel Juice, Cobralingus) and transitional ode to musical Manchester Needle in the Groove, Noon drifted even further from traditional modes of science fiction, working to match the ever-adapting techniques of then-contemporary electronic music and – in Cobralingus – offering a “how to” guide to the curious reader in the process.

Until recently, 2002’s Falling Out of Cars looked like it might be the last Jeff Noon novel. If the fractured mirror landscape of the book often proved to be as startling and dissociative for the reader as they were for the characters then that was probably a feature rather than a bug – Falling Out of Cars made the fact that all of Noon’s adventures in wonderland had been tainted by life on this side of the mirror horribly clear.

This notion was always there in Noon’s work – no amount of strain is going to make a looking glass show something that isn’t already here waiting to be reflected, after all – but in Falling Out of Cars it became inescapable. This made the subsequent absence of a “new Jeff Noon novel” seem more explicable, if still somewhat tragic – what better note for an author to stop writing on than this, a story about people whose very ability to comprehend the world and words around them was slipping away.

There were some signs of writerly life though, like 2008’s 217 Babel Street – a collaborative hyperlink fiction the served as the real world scaffolding on a fictional location – and 2012 has seen Noon’s strange pollen corrupting the air stream on a previously inconceivable scale. Noon’s endlessly imaginative twitter account is one of the best follows out there for those in a Mindless frame of mind, and if his microfictional “spore” fictions leave you craving more there’s always the echovirus12 account, to which Noon also contributes.

For those who like their fiction to occupy a more traditional form, there’s also a new novel, Channel SK1N, the story of a pop star who finds her skin overridden by the signals all around her as she transforms in a way that blurs the line between broadcaster and receiver. I’ve only just finished reading the book, and I hope you’ll forgive the ecstatic tone of this introduction because Channel SK1N combines the lysergically enhanced rush of Noon’s early fiction with the queasy comedowns of his later work, and in doing so reaffirms sci-fi’s status as the best tool available to writers who want to explore a future that’s here somewhere, already hidden.

Still buzzing off my contact with his SK1N, I got in touch with Noon to discuss his dazzling reemergence as a self-publishing internet invader…

 

GITW Illogical Volume: It’s been ten years since you slipped through the darkly reflective cracks of Falling Out Of Cars; ?dlrow rorrim eht ni emit ruoy saw woH

Jeff Noon: Falling Out Of Cars seemed like the end of a period in my life, work-wise, and also I’d just left Manchester (my home town), so it felt like a good time to make some changes. I fell into screenwriting, and had some fun days and some bad days in that world. I was working on various scripts for a number of production companies. I also went back into the theatre, which was my first love in writing terms. I did a play for The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield about the early days of the Mod movement and a science fiction audio play for Radio 3. I still hang onto hope regarding the film scripts, but it’s a difficult media to succeed in, no doubt about it. Eventually, I realised that I’d been without a proper audience for 10 years, so I started writing prose again. I dug out Channel SK1N, which I written a draft of a couple of years previously, and started working on that. And that was the transit point.

That was a transit point, and so is this – click here for more vurty goodness!

Talking Comics #1

April 1st, 2012

Don’t worry, despite the title, this isn’t an attempt to take on the SILENCE! boys at their own game – if I was trying to do that I would have sabotaged Gary Lactus’ spaceship while he was up visiting me in Scorchland, then suggested myself as a replacement for the podcast while “comforting” The Beast Must Die. What’s the point in playing if you’re not playing to win, right?

Right.

Talking Comics is an attempt to reanimate that stinkiest of walking corpses, the comics review post. Now I could have called in Mister Attack aka The Eurythmic King of Nowhere aka The Boy Fae the Heed aka Flippant She-Creature like I have the last couple of times in the hopes of making these grizzly bones dance, but I decided to place my faith in technology.

So: rather than writing reviews of last week’s comics the old fashioned way, with fists, I decided to speak my brains into twitter via my smart phone and see what happened.  Unfortunately, since I’m a Scottish, and since the Scottish are natural enemies of voice recognition technology, the results are a little scrambled:

Daredevil #10, by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera, Javier Rodriguez and Joe Carmagna.

See, told ya!

More nonce-sense follows!