Authors are usually asked to write the backcover blurbs for their books, and in Noon’s case it’s quite evident that many of his ideas have survived into the final version. The blurb for Automated Alice, for example, instantly sets the mood of the work.

Vurt
Take a trip in a stranger’s 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 isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. A journey towards the ultimate, perhaps even mythical, Vurt feather. Curious Yellow.

Pollen
The sweet death of Coyote, master taxi driver, was only the first. Soon people are sneezing and dying all over Manchester. Telekinetic cop Sybil Jones knows that, like Coyote, they died happy – but even a happy death can be murder. As exotic blooms begin to flower all over the city, the pollen count is racing towards 2000 and Sybil is running out of time.

Automated Alice
In the last years of his life, the fantasist, Lewis Carroll, wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody. It was only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.
That’s not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O’Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book he sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.
Oh dear, that’s not at all right. This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O’Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too... a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.

Nymphomation
The air of Manchester is alive with blurbvurts, automated advertisements chanting their slogans. But the loudest of all is for Domino Bones, the new lottery game. Every Friday night the winning numbers are illuminated on the body of Lady Luck, the voluptuous figurehead of the game. For the winner, it is unimaginable riches, for the losers another week to wait for the bones to fall again. But there is only one real winner, The Company, which plays the city’s fragile expectations with callous ease.
A group of mathematics students are looking at the mind-numbling probabilities involved and searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. They watch the city at work and at dangerous play 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...

Pixel Juice
From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of dance culture comes a selection of fifty stories, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain weird: urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, true confessions, word-dizzy rollercoasters, product recalls, adverts for mad gadgets, dub cut prose remixes. Throughout them all, Jeff Noon delights in the magical possibilities of language, creating a wholly new kind of storytelling.
Ideas-per-page rating: dangerously close to the legal limit.

Needle in the Groove
if drugs we 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 way of funky seduction / but just as their first dance record is climbing the charts, one of the band disappears / elliot’s search for the missing musician becomes a wild, fiercely emotional trip into the dark soul of rhythm
in this astonishing novel jeff noon conjures the mystery of dance culture like no other writer / allowing the complex rhythms of the music to infect his language, noon creates a new kind of writing / liquid dub poetics / in the grooves he discovers a world where the scratches of the stylus cut the body / a dj’s samples are melodies of blood / love is a ghost lost in the boom box / and the only remix that really matters is the remix of the heart

Cobralingus
Thank you for reading this promotional blurb for the Cobralingus Engine.
Cobralingus allows language to partake of a future liquid state of consciousness. It uses the Metamorphiction process to apply the techniques 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.
Please note: Cobralingus uses only imaginary technologies and the strangely twisted pathways inside Jeff Noon’s head.
This blurb is now complete.

Falling Out of Cars
In a world overflowing with images, how can you tell who you really are?
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 grief, to keep moving, to maybe find a destination to 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 falling prey to a sickness, a disease that seems to change the world around her. Only by recording her feelings in a notebook can she hope to 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 weirder, and more dangerous, than she ever imagined.
Where do you come from? And where are you going? A road novel for the twenty-first century, Falling Out of Cars explores a country, and a psyche, falling off the edge of reality.

Works – A detailed bibliography of Noon’s published works, with summaries and commentary.

Interview – Ismo Santala interviews Jeff Noon.