PTC Vurt," by Jeff Noon. 352 pages. New York: Crown Publishing. $22
In the beginning, back in the 1980s, there was the cyberpunk novel, a science-fiction subgenre that explored the computer-generated worlds of virtual reality. Now, in the 1990s, new authors and recombinant forms are emerging from the corpus of cyberpunk fiction, once dominated by the American writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The most prominent newcomer is the Manchester-born Englishman Jeff Noon, whose first novel, a cyber-fairy tale called " Vurt," was this year's winner of Britain's Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction.
Had I the means, I too would give this book a prize: the Anne Rice award for unrelieved tedium in the category of fantasy. Strip away its stylish techno-jargon, its crowds of futuristic carnival freaks, and what is left of " Vurt" is a plot composed entirely of monotonously recycled fragments of old books and movies, with characters who exhibit a level of sophistication roughly equal to that of an after-school special.
These are a gang of " young hip malcontents" who call themselves the Stash Riders and cruise around Manchester in a van sometime in the bleak near future, looking for drugs and trouble. Their narcotics of choice are computer-coded feathers -- some legal, some not -- which, when stuck down their throats, transport them to various virtual-reality worlds, or Vurts. One of the Stash Riders, a young girl named Desdemona, has gotten lost inside a Vurt; the book's narrator, Scribble, spends the length of the novel in an Orphic quest to retrieve Desdemona (who is his sister as well as his lover) from the drug-induced netherworld.
Along the way, Scribble and his gang (Beetle, Mandy, Bridget, Tristan, and a pet tentacled alien) battle a series of mortal enemies, from an evil she-cop named Murdoch to a pack of nasty half-human canines whose leader is called Das Uberdog. And not only man-dogs and Englishmen are out in Jeff Noon's day sun. There are also poisonous dreamsnakes, robogoths, Shadowgirls, and a grand elusive wizard named Game Cat who engineers the simulated universes of the Vurt. And there are scores of sentences every bit as puerile as these: " I was shaking from the memories; Desdemona was aching in my heart." " All I want to do is be in Vurt. Be in Vurt forever. Life's too much for me. I can't stand the pain."
If only readers were given some information about what goes on in that real world. Mr. Noon is so busy presenting parallel universes that he never bothers to tell us just what these alienated youths are alienated from. And his self-conscious references to previous works, " A Clockwork Orange," " Alice in Wonderland" and " Jabberwocky," " The Wizard of Oz," " Blade Runner," seem less like witty homages than additional laziness, mere shorthand for classic representations of fantasy that relieve the author from the actual work of invention itself. The violence, incest, drug addiction and obscenity in Vurt fail to shock or even elicit interest, and it's because we have seen it all before, in fresher forms. Besotted with technology though we may be, no reader, from the science-fiction devotee to the general-interest browser, can fail to make the distinction in this book between virtual and outright fraudulence.
Donna Rifkind, a former literary agent and magazine editor, is writing a book of essays about Los Angeles. She contributed to the anthology " Beyond the Boom" (Poseidon, 1990). Her work has been published in the American Scholar, the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement among others.