The detective John Nyquist "plays" or games and/or is governed by these surreal conjugations of reality in The Body Library ( 2018), he finds himself in Storyville, a world patrolled by "narrative officers" who cannot control the tendency of inhabitants to jump storylines. Something similar might be said of the John Nyquist sequence beginning with A Man of Shadows ( 2017), set in a futuristic (but possibly not exactly Near Future) City, where noir routines and postmodern turns (see Postmodernism and SF) juggle with each other in a complex Time Opera. The book ends in riffs of disintegration. The themes and metamorphic moves of Vurt can be detected in both the short pieces assembled in Pixel Juice: Stories from the Avant Pulp (coll 1998) and in Needle in the Groove ( 1999), though not Falling Out of Cars ( 2002), even though the Disaster that has inflicted Britain – a kind of information plague that falsifies all visual messages – again has recourse to an underlying drug-based rational, not dissimilar to the reality-creating drugs in much of the work of Philip K Dick and once again evocative of Lewis Carroll through a ubiquity of mirrors that are, and are not, portals. Nymphomation treats the giving and taking of reality states in terms of a television lottery game based on dominoes whose values shift surreally. Automated Alice makes explicit the structural parallels between Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland ( 1865) and the toxic realms within Manchester, though the tale itself segues into realms distant from this Earth, or sf. Pollen ( 1995), set a few years later as Vurt more and more deeply infects rain-drenched Manchester, moves edgily and Equipoisally towards the modal depictions of the City normally found in Urban Fantasy (as defined in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). Vurt won the 1994 Arthur C Clarke Award Noon also won the John W Campbell Award for best new writer in 1995. Vurt itself is a reality-shifting Drug and/or Videogame, which destabilizes the Perceptions of the cast, who may be accessing one Virtual Reality world, or many. (1957- ) UK author whose first publications as an sf writer comprise the Vurt sequence comprising Vurt ( 1993 exp as coll 2013), Pollen ( 1995), Automated Alice ( 1996) and Nymphomation ( 1997), all set in various versions of a Near-Future Manchester irradiated by Cyberpunk marriages of the human and non-human, all tales being told in a slapstick gonzo, Mean-Streets idiom and featuring a driven (though occasionally tangled) narrative line.
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