Pollen

The sweet death of Coyote, master taxi driver, was only the first. Soon people are sneezing and dying all over Manchester. Telekinetic cop Sybil Jones knows that, like Coyote, they died happy - but even a happy death can be a murder. As exotic blooms begin to flower all over the city, the pollen count is racing towards 2000 and Sybil is running out of time. 'As weird as it is wonderful ...surprising in its subtlety and deftness of characterisation'. - "The Times". 'Great fun. Read it.' - "Mail on Sunday". 'A genuinely new flavour ...the first of the psychedelic cyberfantasists'. - Charles Shaar Murray, "Time Out". 'Jeff Noon's books are so good they should come with a government warning'. -Jockeyslut.

If you like challenging science fiction, then Jeff Noon is the author for you.

Pollen is the sequel to Vurt (winner of the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke award), and both are concerned with a world in which dreams, drug-induced hallucination, and reality become completely intermingled. In this volume, the dream world unleashes a pollen that threatens to cause people in the real world to sneeze to death.

But no review can do Noon's writing justice: it's a phantasmagoric combination of the more imaginative science fiction masters, such as Phillip K. Dick, genres such as cyberpunk and pulp fiction, and drug culture.

If you would like a more accessible approach to Jeff Noon's richly imagined world, I recommend Automated Alice, a modern recasting of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.