where the stories come from

Jeff Noon

VURT
I'd spent a good number of years trying to make some money by writing plays, with no real success. So I took a job at Waterstone's bookshop in Manchester. Someone else working there was a fringe theatre director and was always asking me to write him a play. The only project I had in mind was an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden. This was an anti-authoritarian novel written in 1899, and one that I always felt could have a modern relevance. At this time also, news of the first developments in Virtual Reality technology was just coming over from the States, specifically in the magazine Mondo 2000. I came up with the idea that the Torture Garden in the novel could be represented by a virtual world. The only trouble being that the book doesn't really have a narrative as such, more a series of images. So I added this story to it, about a man losing his sister to this virtual Torture Garden, and going into the world to rescue her. I wrote about half of this play, when the director got a chance to work in Hong Kong, which he took. So I was left with half a play…

A few weeks later, another person at the shop decided to set up a small publishing house called Ringpull Press. He liked my plays, and asked me to have a go at writing a novel. I said I would, and started writing Vurt. And quite naturally, I took the basic plot I'd added to the Torture garden as my starting point. It grew organically from that seed.

I can remember writing the bit where the heroes are down below the house of dogs, running through the lake of dogshit, and thinking, "Why the hell am I doing this to them?" It reminded me of the scene in the first Star Wars film, where they're trapped in the Deathstar's sewer, and that got me thinking about other connections to Stars Wars. There seemed so many of them, it made me think about Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which George Lucas used as his starting point for the film. The book examines myths from all around the world, in order to chart the ultimate narrative. I'd read this book a few years before, and it became obvious that I'd used the same structure in Vurt. I won't go into it further, because readers may want to discover the parallels for themselves.

POLLEN
Pollen also started from a play. This was written some years before, and was never performed. I actually destroyed the manuscript. But as I was finishing Vurt, and thinking about the next novel, suddenly the old play popped into my head. I realised it would be perfect to set the same story in the Vurt universe. I couldn't remember hardly any of the details of the play, so I just started again from the same basic premise of a hay fever epidemic. Unfortunately, I can't recall the initial inspiration for the play, beyond having suffered terribly from the complaint as a child, and that news of the Aids epidemic was just coming through.

Pollen is when I really started to write. I look back on Vurt as an apprentice work, constructed out of other people's inspiration. Basically, I was trying to import William Gibson into Manchester. You can see the joins. It was a book that had to be written, and I was lucky enough to be there at the time. Any number of other writers could've come up with the same basic book. But only one person could have written Pollen. There's a scene towards the end of the book where Coyote has turned into a boat and he's carrying this strange collection of weird people across the river of death, and I just thought as I wrote, This is me. Nobody else could've done this. That's when I really started writing.

AUTOMATED ALICE
Again, this started as an idea for a play. Never written, just an idea jotted in a notebook. I've always been fascinated with the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, and especially Martin Gardener's Annotated Alice. This book was resting on my workdesk one day, when the title transformed in my mind, into Armour-plated Alice. A corresponding image came to me then, of a steam-driven Alice doll. The title changed again, to Automated Alice, and the image softened, to become an exact replica of Alice, a robotic Alice. I made a few notes, and forgot about the idea.

After Pollen, I was a bit worried about what to do next. I'd actually started a third Vurt novel, but I wasn't getting into it, it felt like I was repeating myself. I didn't want people to know what to expect from me, and also I wanted to extend my audience a little. The Automated Alice project seemed perfect to do that. Alice of course had featured in both of my previous books, especially in Pollen, where she appears as a very sick, dying child. I felt it was time to rescue her from her fate, bring her back to life, in my own peculiar way.

I was nervous about writing this third Alice book, but from the very first page I felt that Lewis Carroll was there to help me along. In the opening poem I'd written the phrase about saving Alice from the "ravages of time", and a voice in my head told me to change it into the "radishes of time"! That's when I knew, it was going to be alright.

NYMPHOMATION
This was a word used in the Torture Garden play, to denote the type of artificial information system that can propagate itself. Since the play was abandoned, it had been a word in search of a story. I'd had this idea of doing a third Vurt novel set after the time of Pollen. I'd written about fifty pages of this, abandoned it, gone on to write Automated Alice. After that was done, I came back to have a look at the story. The only bit that really excited me was this throwaway line about these people in a pub playing this strange National Domino game. I thought, well maybe the novel's about that, about the game, and the game uses the Nymphomation system to propagate itself. Based on the National Lottery, of course, and the attendant wave of obsession. At the same time, I'd come up with the mad idea of carrying on Automated Alice's story, into the future, and the two ideas came together. It became a book about the origins of the Vurt feathers, and Alice's role in that creation.

I was doing a reading in Manchester one time, and a woman asked me what I was working on at the moment, and I told her about this idea of a first Vurt novel. And she said, "Oh, you mean it'll end with the first line of Vurt?" And I said, "Erm…yeah!" So, it does. All four books connect in weird ways, a web of connections. There will be one last Vurt book, but what form that will take, and when I write it, nobody knows. For the moment I feel like moving away from the overtly Science Fictional elements of my work. Maybe write something a bit more real, a bit more character-based. Something about music. I have lots of different kinds of books to write, I never want to feel trapped in any particular genre.

As Joe Crocus says in Pollen: Open all channels-connect to everything.

Read Jeff's notes on the writing of Needle In The Groove

Read Jeff's notes on the writing of Pixel Juice