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Sci-Fi author Jeff Noon has gained a strong cult following for his small, largely Manchester-based and wholly bizarre output. Pixel Juice is his first break from the novel format into short stories, although rather than this being a collection of previously published yarns, it's a collection of many of Noon's weirdest and wackiest ideas in a sequence of often interlinked tales.
Noon's stories delve into a present or near future of music, childhood, computer hacking, genetic modification, sex and advertising. His characters live, above all, for media; a delinquent becomes a local celebrity for having his face pixelised on a TV crime report; a young girl becomes a living advert for herself.
Reading the book is like being sandblasted with ideas. The immortality of fame becomes an actual immortality, parents are paid by corporations for the right to implant advertising in their children, mirrors start to show the wrong reflections, a thought recognition Operating System (Chromosoft's Mirrors, with the slogan "Where's your head today?") goes terribly wrong, rich kids have companions manufactured for them from their own DNA, Marilyn Monroe celebrity cyborgs are recalled due to virus infection, a boy lives with a miniature moon in his stomach. Lesser authors would have kept most of these ideas for their next half-dozen novels.
Noon is not content with telling separate stories. Many are interlinked into a sort of digital convergence fiction - a minor character from one pops up in another, a key concept of one story is briefly mentioned in a previous one. He constantly redraws the boundaries of his ideas. He plays with form, with remixes of previous stories in Dub or Haiku. He weaves phrases like a demented virtuoso DJ on his turntables, twisting words into unusual patterns, letting them mutate and breed; you'll laugh in appreciation of his wordplay as much as of his darkly humorous situations.
Noon is a Jorge Luis Borges of the post-cyberpunk era - an influence (along with Philip K. Dick) he mocks himself for in the penultimate item, a limerick remix of the entire collection. Pixel Juice is an enormously engaging read which makes me more convinced than ever that Noon is about the most exciting author currently working Science Fiction. Very highly recommended.
Originally reviewed in issue 10
by Andrew Korn.
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