The High Noon of Pulp

Jeff Noon, the Dr Strange of avant pulp and technofantasy, returned last week to worry at one of his perennial concerns — the media-saturated environment we are immersed in.

Jeff Noon, the Dr Strange of avant pulp and technofantasy, returned last week to worry at one of his perennial concerns — the media-saturated environment we are immersed in. His latest novel, Channel SK1N, is out on Amazon, a story about a woman whose body picks up broadcasts — talking heads at the wrists, police band behind the ear, satellite soaps in the small of the back, that sort of thing. I can't wait for it to come to Flipkart, which stocks Noon's earlier works like Vurt and Automated Alice, which had made him a cult figure. But if you haven't heard of Jeff Noon, you're excused. The thing about cults is, you usually don't know much about them until you get admission.

Noonism is a cult that you will probably want to hang out with. But the book to initiate yourself with is not his latest novel — or any of his novels, actually — but Pixel Juice (1998), a coruscating bomb burst of 50 short stories. Pulled writhing and kicking from the imagination of a writer who speculates obsessively about absolutely everything, from the unhealthy competitiveness of dance culture to the notion that the human body has an off switch, this collection shows off all of Noon's many avatars. The stories are rainbow-hued, some autobiographical, some episodes in a larger sequence, some crossfading thematically into each other and some linking to back-stories in the Noon multiverse.

Noon is one of those people who probably write novels only because the publishing industry fetishises full-length work, but actually take wing in their short stories. Pixel Juice reveals the hall of mirrors in which Noon writes. Reflected there are the shades of Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Robert A Heinlein, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, William Gibson, Hermann Hesse… names to conjure with from the realm of ­fantastical and speculative fiction.

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