Automated Alice - Softcover

Noon, Jeff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552144789 ISBN 13: 9780552144780

Publisher: Transworld Pub, 1997

Synopsis

In the last years of his life, the fantasist, Lewis Carroll, wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody. It has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.

That's not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book he sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.

Oh dear, that's not at all right. This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too ... a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.

About this title

Review:

Jeff Noon's previous novels, Vurt and Pollen, have attracted a cult following with their psychedelic science fiction creation of the realm of "Vurt"--a region defined by illusion, dream and drug-induced fantasy. Noon has now decided to link up with an imaginative precursor by introducing Lewis Carroll's Alice as the protagonist in a new adventure that draws on Carroll's through-the-looking-glass inversions of reality, and adds a Jeff Noon menace and edginess absent from Carroll's Wonderland. Alice finds herself in 1998 Manchester when she enters an old grandfather clock, and soon becomes the prime suspect in the puzzling "Jigsaw Murders." Noon emulates Carroll's crazy wordplay throughout, and even adds his own illustrations inspired by those of John Tenniel, the famous interpreter of Alice.

From the Publisher:

'THINK BORGES CROSSED WITH PHILIP LARKIN ON ACID AND YOU'VE GOT SOME IDEA OF THE POWER OF ITS VERY ENGLISH ENCHANTMENT' - Arena

'CAPTURES CARROLL'S STYLE EFFORTLESSLY... A WEIRD ALICE WITH A CONTEMPORARY EDGE' - Mail on Sunday

'A WILD PSYCHEDELIC VISION ... I DOUBT THAT THERE WILL BE A MORE JOYOUSLY INVENTIVE BOOK PUBLISHED IN BRITAIN THIS YEAR' - Manchester Evening News

About this edition

• Publisher: Transworld Pub
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0552144789
• ISBN 13: 9780552144780
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256