The Dissemination of the Work of Jeff Noon by Jeff Noon

 

News Update : A brief word from the author on his current projects, written by Jeff Noon. April 2004.

Falling Out of Cars : Story notes behind the novel, written by Jeff Noon.

Mappalujo : Story notes, written by Jeff Noon, on the collaborative web story.

Cobralingus : Information on the formation of this novel, written by Jeff Noon

Post-Futurism : An article concerning the future of the english novel, written by Jeff Noon

Pixel juice : Story notes for Vurtelisers, written by Jeff Noon

Needle in the Groove : Information on the formation of this novel, written by Jeff Noon

Toards a Liquid Groove : A partial discography to the writing of Needle in the Groove, compiled by Jeff Noon

Vurt : The Theatre Remix

click for full development info	FALLING OUT OF CARS Marlene Moore wasn't even sure why she accepted the job, except that it gave her the chance to just get in her car and drive. To escape from her grief, to keep moving, to maybe find a destination for herself. Now she's journeying around England, a land that turns stranger and more dreamlike the further she travels. Along the way she picks up various passengers, each as lost as she is, each on the run from troubles of their own. Slowly, day by day, Marlene is palling prey to a sickness, a disease that seems to change the world around her. Only by recording her feelings in a notebook can she keep track of her life. But now even the notebook seems to be turning against her. And the job that started MArlene on this journey turns out to be far wierder and more dangerous.
The new novel is now finished, and handed into the publishers. Falling Out of Cars is my first novel since leaving Manchester. It's been an interesting journey, to say the least, discovering a new way to write, without the bedrock of the old city. First of all I went through a period of intense experimentation, with language itself as my subject matter. Out of this came my book of textual manipulations, Cobralingus. After this, I felt the need to return once again to storytelling. I then went through many false starts, with many different story ideas, before the idea of the new novel finally took hold. The work brings together several ideas, a few of which link back to previous books, many of them new. I really don't want to give out any major plot details, because the surprise is in the telling. So here I will only talk about the underlying themes and moods of the book. I like to call Falling out of Cars a transcendental road novel. A journey through a strangely transformed, diseased, England. Four desperate people, strangers, in a beat-up old car, brought together in search of certain misplaced, and seemingly magical objects. So, there's a (very) loose connection to the classic Fantasy plot of the quest through the wounded land, albeit set in a recognisable reality. And the quest is not the governing force behind the novel; these people are, to all intents and purposes, lost. They're driving, just driving. Running away, each from their own personal troubles. The English road novel has always been seen as a problematic genre, compared to the American model. There's just not enough space in this country, for people to get lost in. However, I was interested in the number of books that have come out in the last few years, dealing with the idea of the "non-space". All those journeys around the London orbital, and through the cold wastes of suburbia. The Boring Postcards book also plays with this idea. So, maybe an English road novel can journey through these various non-spaces, this is where the sense of loss will be most intensely felt. It's a first person narrative, told through the journal of Marlene, one of the travellers. Because of the nature of the land, the disease, and also because of her own damaged psyche, Marlene is a very unreliable narrator. Exactly what is really happening, and what imagined, and how can we tell the difference? Out of this comes the question of self-identity; how, in a time of shifting images, can we really know who we are? These are themes shared with the Mappalujo project. The two works were written at the same time. Although entirely different in style, there is a strange and fruitful osmosis between the two projects. The disease that Marlene is suffering from is an invented one, whose details I will not mention at this point, beyond saying that it's an imagined outcome of certain traits in contemporary society. The actual notebook that Marlene uses is also affected by the same disease. This is the final level of ambiguity. Just what is this thing we are reading, how can we trust it? Is it really possible to capture reality in words? Marlene starts off writing in a journalistic style, and gradually a more poetic expression takes over. Only in this way, can she hope to capture her experiences. The difference between the first, and the last, pages of the novel, just on the level of personal expression, is very pronounced. Words become a part of the trip, a mutating map through which she travels. The book is a study of a woman, and a country, falling off the edge of reality. Some people have told me they found the book rather "dark". Whilst I will not disagree with this opinion, I have tried to write a truthful book about the way we live now, as I see it, and allow for a certain element of hope. I guess I'm entering my Surrealist Noir period. If this sounds all too serious, rest assured that the journey also involves various car chases, gunplay, existential gangsters, magical events, and general weirdness. I suppose the major difference between Falling Out of Cars, and my earlier books, is that this time the strangeness comes directly out of the characters' psyches, rather than being a part of the outside world. This, I hope, leads to a much more unnerving experience for the reader. by Jeff Noon.
click for full development info	COBRALINGUS Cobralingus allows language to partake of a future state of liquid consciousness. It uses the Metamorphication process to apply the technoiques of electronic dance music to the production of words, dissolving language. In this mutated, liquid state, words are manipulated into new forms; borrowed text is sampled and transformed.
There are various other projects floating around; websites, films, plays, etc, all of them still very much up in the air, so I won't talk about any of them just yet. But there's one thing I can't resist mentioning. I couple of months ago I received a telephone call from Brian Eno. I've never met him before, but I'd sent him a copy of Cobralingus when the book first came out, just on the off chance, and subsequently forgotten about it. Then he gives me a ring, and tells me that he loves the book, and that he's doing a piece of music based on some of the texts! He wants me to come down to his studio and listen to the first, rough version of it. So, there I was, inside Eno's studio, listening to this amazing music coming out of the speakers, and a voice intoning words that I had written. It was more than a little overwhelming, as you may imagine. Most gratifying was the fact that he liked Cobralingus so much, because he was one of the influences behind the project, especially with his set of creative instruction cards, Oblique Strategies. When, where, if and how this music will be released, I'm afraid I just don't know. But definitely one to look out for. by Jeff Noon.
click for full development info	NEEDLE IN THE GROOVE If music were a drug, where would it take you? If drugs were music, how would you listen? After years of playing bass in lousy two-bit bands, elliot finally gets his big chance / he meets a singer, a dj and a drummer who seem to have everything / passion, talent, hypnotic songs and a whole new funky way of seduction / but just as their first dance record is climbing the charts, one of the band disappears / elliots search for the missing musician becomes a wild, fiercely emotional trip into the dark soul of rhythm.
It's always difficult to talk in terms of straight drafts, since the onset of the word processor, because the whole process has become more organic, more a case of osmosis, I guess, with one draft kinda merging freely into the next. I've just had a look in my computer's files, and I find there four seperate folders have been created, all to do with novels based on the basic premise of liquid music, and Manchester's pop history. Each folder would be me starting a different novel based on the idea. So we can assume that four different novels have been considered. by Jeff Noon.
click for full development info	PIXEL JUICE The Project: As one novel comes to an end, Bill, my editor at Transworld, always takes me out and we discuss ideas for the next project. I'd just finished Nymphomation, the writing of which had caused me no end of problems, and I was looking for an easier option. "Why don't you give yourself a break," Bill said, "Collect your short stories together, maybe add a few more." Fine, okay, we can do that. Trouble is, when I got home and pulled down the old files, I found myself shaking my head in despair. Okay, there were a few good ideas here and there, but the short story craft was just not part of my repertoire. The novel allows me to go mad, to overindulge, and I've always thought my work comes out best when it's travelling along strange tangents. Also, in all honesty I was unhappy with the idea of just collecting old stuff together, it didn't seem to give value. I decided instead to write a whole load of new stories, just to see what would come out. Just to see if I could crack this short story thing. Of course, this was the exact opposite of the stated "easy option", but the truth is, I love to work. First Draft: I took the few stories I could still believe in, arranged them in some kind of order, and then started to think about new stories that could fit between them. I'd come up with the idea of writing a book of stories that worked as a whole, with lots of links, mirror images, strange connections. Maybe a hidden narrative behind all the different tales. Also, I was determined to create something that would show off all my various writing skills, a book that revelled in style, in language, in meaning. A book of mysteries. Something curious and tantalising. Also, I wanted the book to contain some surprises, some tales of real life, if you will. I started to search through old files, old ideas books, jotting down new concepts on scraps of paper. Soon, I had enough to go on, and started to write. It happened remarkably quickly, given the range of material on view. Story led to story, as I took up the loose ends of one tale, made it into a new narrative. The golden number of fifty stories raised its head. Given the diversity of the book, its somewhat chaotic nature, putting exactly fifty stories in seemed a way of saying there was a governing principle behind it. I arranged the stories in some kind of vague order, from innocence to experience, and then sent it off to Bill for his thoughts. Second Draft: Bill was enthusiastic on the whole, saying he liked the overall concept and the differing styles. He named some stories he wasn't too keen on (interestingly enough, these were earlier already-in-existence stories) and I either remixed these, or removed them all together. With the number fifty still in mind I now had to replace these with new stories. The main problem Bill had with the book was the order of the stories. He came up with the idea of splitting it into four sections, maybe with each section having its own title and feel. His idea was to start off with the more "normal" stories, and then work towards the weirder ones. Also, he thought that each section should mirror this process in miniature, normal to strange. I was keen on this idea, so I rearranged the stories accordingly, coming up with the four different titles, the four different concepts for each section. It was never going to make perfect sense, but at least the book started to have an overall shape. Third Draft: Rereading it, I made a final decision about certain stories, deciding they just weren't up to scratch. Again, these had to be replaced, more work. Funnily enough, some of these last minute, quickly-written stories are perhaps the more interesting ones. But that's often the way. I'm a great fan of massive changes at the last minute! Anyway, the book was now complete. Here contained are a few notes, thoughts, fantasies, about each story in turn, for anybody interested in this kind of opening out. by Jeff Noon
	NYMPHOMATION The air of Manchester is alive with Blurbflies, Automated Advertisements chanting their slogans. The loudest of all is for Domino Bones, the new lottery game. Every Friday night Manchester stills as the bones tumble into a winning combination, the population hooked on this rampant dream. But there is only one real winner. The Company, who plays the city's fragile expectations with callous ease and milks it to the final drop. A group of mathematics students are looking at the odds, at the mind numbing probabilities involved and searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. They watch the city at work and slowly uncover the sinister realities behind the mania. The company is devouring Manchester - it has the Nymphomation, an evolutionary process which has the power to take over the city's dreams.
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. by Jeff Noon.
	AUTOMATED ALICE In the last years of his life, the fantasist Charles Dodgson wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or shown to anybody. That's not quite true. Automated Alice was written by Lewis Caroll, Lewis Caroll was the nom de plume of Charles Dodgson. No, that's not even slighly true either. Automated Alice was written by Zenith O'Clock, the Writer of Wrongs. Oh dear that's not at all right. This book was written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental; mutant hybrids, sinister gameplay, chaos theory, a robo-Alice, quantum physics, computermites, jigsaw killers, tickling vurt feathers, puzzle poems and an invisible cat called Quark.
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. by Jeff Noon.
	POLLEN In a strange remixed future of Manchester a cloud of pollen descends - a new strain, each tiny grain a murderer. Within days the streets of the city are overgrown with viscious blooms as the fiercest hay fever epidemic takes hold. People are sneezing themselves to death and the pollen count is racing towards 2,000.
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. by Jeff Noon.
	VURT Take a trip in a strangers head. Along rainshot streets with the Stash Riders, a posse of hip malcontents hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Vurt Feathers. But as the Game Cat says, be careful, be very careful. This ride is not for the weak. Scribble isnt listening. He has to find his lost love. A journey towards the ultimate, perhaps even mythical, Vurt feather - Curious Yellow.
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 Mondo2000. 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. by Jeff Noon.

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