A Roadmap to the Work of Jeff Noon, the Most Original Sci-Fi Writer You (Probably) Haven’t Read

The best place to start: Pixel Juice
While perhaps not the most accessible book in Jeff Noon’s bibliography, Pixel Juice is as good a place to start as any. A heady, bizarre collection of surrealist stories, bizarre anecdotes, a poem or two, and even dub-styled “remixes” of some of his stories into abstract poems, it’s a good sampler of all the various weird styles you’ll encounter in his novel-length books. Many of the stories in Pixel Juice offer glimpses into the setting of Noon’s Manchester-set Vurt series, which comprises most of the books on this list. For these reasons and others, Pixel Juice serves as an excellent sampler of Jeff Noon, and a good place to get your feet wet.

If you like Alice in Wonderland: The Automated Alice
Billed as a “trequel,” or a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, this is possibly the other best place to begin reading Jeff Noon. During a boring day at her Aunt’s, Alice lets Whippoorwill the parrot out of his cage. When the parrot flies into a grandfather clock and disappears, Alice follows him down into a strange world of tarantula film directors, termite computers, and bizarre laws. As Alice journeys through the land inside the clock, led by an odd doppelgänger named Celia, Noon, like Carroll before him, takes the time to satirize the modern world and its conventions, as well as his own life and work (he appears as an author under the pen name “O’Clock.”) As the book goes on, it also finds Alice interrogating the very nature of reality and her existence, which allows the book to gradually up the weirdness quotient to its unusual conclusion.

If you want a straightforward read: Nymphomation
I’m not going to beat around the bush here: Nymphomation is about a group of people trying to rig a lottery game using black magic and a method of breeding numbers and mathematical disciplines to create evolved forms. That’s the basic premise, anyway. But as the multi-viewpoint novel goes on, it’s clear that’s not all that’s going on. It switches gears fairly frequently, the end result being something that isn’t quite a cosmic horror tale, or a conspiracy thriller, or biopunk,or body horror, or cyberpunk, but which sprawls comfortably across them all. It’s also the Noon book that tells the most straightforward story, though his hallucinatory imagery, bizarre sensory details, and abstract poetry are still on full display. If you’re looking for something entirely different but still more or less accessible, this is the book for you.

If you want something truly strange: Vurt
I once described this one as “Trainspotting on hallucinogens, but in the future” but even that doesn’t do it justice. Vurt is the story of Scribble and his friends, who call themselves the “Stash Raiders” and use their government benefits to buy the latest drugs¯hallucinogenic virtual-reality feathers called Vurt. When Scribble and his sister Desdemona try an illegal yellow feather by the name of English Voodoo, Des gets trapped in the virtual world, and the Vurt spits out an eldritch abomination in her place. The plot follows Scribble’s attempts to rescue Des by journeying through the odd landscape of future Manchester and the even stranger land of the feathers, all of which seem to be linked to a bizarre dreamworld bleeding into the characters’ own. Cool ideas abound on every page, while the hallucinatory prose, inventive future-speak, and free-floating plot reward patient readers with an incredible payoff. An essential read, but maybe not for the Noon neophyte.

If you’d like something a little more abstract: Mappalujo
Mappalujo is a writing game devised by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard, taking place in the odd city of Lujo. The two authors assembled the interlocking stories in turn, passing the manuscript back and forth, each following an odd series of rules, the plot beats gridded out on a “map.” Each section of the book is prefaced by a series of “shrines,” which outline the influences the authors used to create their stories. The result is the dark and surreal story of a city ruled by the omnipresent Zeno Entertainment Corporation, owner of the Dream Factory that makes everything and provides the citizens with masks and companion toys called “zeenies.” The patchwork tone and constant shifting of viewpoints can be hard for to get a handle on, but Lujo is a setting every bit as vibrant and wonderful as Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris or China Miéville’s New Crobuzon.
Noon’s next novel, A Man of Shadows, is due for release in August 2017 from Angry Robot.