Vurt

Feathers come in many colours, and each colour a different thing. There's. Black - painful, gentle; and Pink - for porno, your every eroticism fulfilled. Blues are legal, for dreaming well, and Silver for the techies who make other colours. But the Yellows are something else entirely - dangerous, exciting, a world beyond normal ken. And it is a Yellow that takes Desdemona from Scribble (her brother, her lover), one day, leaving an amorphous alien in her place. Now Scribble must find the same yellow feather - the rarest of rare, Curious Yellow - to get her back. But there's shadowcops and robos and rock and roll dogmen between him and his Feather, and the price may be more than he can bear... Stylistically similar to William Gibson's 'Neuromancer', and often compared to Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange', Jeff Noon has made one of the oddest 'future history' worlds ever. His world is a kaleidoscopic, weird, seriously drugged-up, and somewhat incestuous hell-hole, where addiction is traded for a form of enlightenment. The science is improbable, but fun, and never defined enough to become a hindrance to the story. This is not quite Cyberpunk, but has enough similarities to feel fairly comfortable in the company of quite a few of the sub-genres. Gotta say I hope we as a species never end up living in a world like this one . . .