Jeff Noon

He was a British novelist who was born in 1957 in Droylsden, Lancashire, England. He is also a playwright, bookseller, performer and a short story writer.

His first four novels, which share characters and settings, are commonly referred to as the 'Vurt series': Vurt (1993), Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996), and Nymphomation (1997). Automated Alice is a "trequel" to Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There(1871). The novella tells the story of Alice's journey to a future Manchester of 1998 populated by Newmonians, who suffer from newmonia (pronounced the same as the real illness pneumonia), Civil Serpents and her cat named Quark. Alice also meets a certain author by the name of Zenith O’Clock. As it is said before, Alice appeared in Noon's previous books, but especially in Pollen, where she appears as a very sick and dying child, but here he brings her back to life as he has written in his official site.

Other Noon's works are Pixel Juice (1998)that is a collection of fifty short stories, Needle in the Groove (2000), a novella, which follows Elliot Hill in Manchester's music scene during the latter half of the twentieth-century, Cobralingus (2001) a collection of ten short pieces that he calls "metamorphiction" , Falling out of Cars (2002) a road novel that follows the journey of Marlene Moore, who is a journalist, and three more companions around a diseased England and 217 Babel Street (2008), which is a project with four authors, Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, William Shaw and Noon. It consisted in a series of interconnected short stories in a fictional British apartment building.

Bibliography:

Noon, Jeff. Metamorphiction - Official site. 15 June 2012 <http://www.metamorphiction.com/>

Santala, Ismo. "Jeff Noon". The Modern Word. 15 June 2012 <http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/noon.html>