SEMIOPUNK (25)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 1, 2024

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

VURT

Vurt is a 1993 sf novel written by British author Jeff Noon. In the anarchic, rain-swept environs of future Manchester, England, nearly everyone is obsessed with “Vurt” — a vast multiplayer virtual reality game/consensual hallucination accessed by sucking on drug-infused colored feathers. Through some never-explained mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become real, or “real” — it’s hard to say which.

The potency of the feathers runs from low-level legal Soapvurt where the user gets to live in a Perky Pat-style house and interact with famous soap opera characters to illegal feathers like Black Voodoo that propel you to a parallel reality where you will experience either ecstasy or a nightmare that may drive you insane.

Game Cat, meanwhile, is a near-mythical being who knows and shares the inside info about Vurt in his “Game Cat” periodical.

Also: dog-human hybrids have formed a thriving subculture, with their own rock stars; flesh cops and “shadowcops” (part flying android, part mist creature capable of reading people’s minds) pursue those who access illicit versions of vurt; and there’s and there’s a tentacled, multi-orificed, harmless Thing From Outer Space, too.

Vurt, it seems, is in fact a kind of parallel world, or multiverse; you can lose things there, and bring other things back. This is the situation haunting our narrator, Scribble, who’s lost his sister Desdemona somewhere in the game. The Thing From Outer Space has taken Dedemona’s place in our world, so Scribble lugs it around in an effort to swap the blob back again for his sister.

As he careens around with his friends, the charismatic but largely unsympathetic Stash Riders (including Beetle, Mandy, the “shadowgirl” Bridget, and Twinkle), in search of exotic and illicit vurt feathers, Scribble schemes to retrieve Desdemona, somehow, from wherever she may be.

I’d intended to write about Vurt for this SEMIOPUNK series, but then my friend Tim Spencer, a British semiotician, wrote about it for the DECODER series (of which I’m the editor) at HILOBROW’s sister website, SEMIOVOX. So I’m going to let Tim explain to us why this sci-fi book is of significance to semioticians:

The virtual worlds [Scribble] explores contain portals to other virtual worlds. Also, each virtual world is inhabited by distinct archetypes, who are able to cross the divides frequently enough to add a critical dynamic to the story.

All of which relates very closely to the adventures of semioticians, who are tasked via each new assignment with exploring a previously unseen world nested within our own default version of reality; and with bringing back knowledge about how to mine it for its riches, say, or how to inhabit it and thrive there. Perhaps it’s the world of Male Midlife Anxiety, or of Dental Health Care. Each is its own self-formed virtual reality within our default uber-reality.

We journey inwards into cultural “pocket universes,” arriving in unfamiliar and sometimes quite strange conceptual spaces. Deploying outsider thinking as our magic amulet, we work out the language of that space, determine how to navigate it, and negotiate with its archetypes. As a tangible example of how these worlds operate, we bring back with us artefacts and other evidence. The mechanisms of action and interaction via which these other worlds operate? They tend to be concealed within the worlds’ materials. By decoding these materials we learn these worlds’ native sensory languages.

If only our work involved licking drug-infused feathers…. *Sigh.*

In the end, Scribble may have to give up everything he knows and loves in order to succeed in his quest. Here’s Tim Spencer, again, with a warning for semioticians:

It requires boldness to explore not only a new world, but the portals between it and other worlds — in order to bring back enriching insights that stretch our too-narrow concepts of the world being explored. However, if we’re too bold, we may travel down too many layers, lose our way, and become snow-blind and lost amidst a blizzard of signifiers.

In our version of the real world, there is no Game Cat to guide us back home.

Right — although we don’t face the existential perils that Scribble and others do in the Vurt forays, semioticians do run the risk of losing sight of our objective, of finding meaning where none exists, of connecting too many dots together….

Noon’s debut novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award (which was not uncontroversial, as many readers and critics disparaged the book); it has become a cult classic.

“In science fiction, once a generation there are one or two voices that capture the times the same as bands do,” Warren Ellis wrote about Vurt. “In 1993, post-rave, where things were still jumping but they were starting to get a bit dark… Jeff Noon was the sound of post-rave.”

Sequels include: Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996), and Nymphomation (1997).

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SEMIOPUNK (25)

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