Last night’s book club meeting went very well. Everyone was pleased to have read Vurt, even if some of them were occasionally grossed out or confused by it. Like any book, it is an artifact of its time, and in the case of Vurt it seems to have an amazing vision of the future, as seen from 1993, and to have some social attitudes that are firmly rooted in the 1960s and ’70s. If it were published now I am sure that it would very soon have a small army of feminist bloggers jumping up and down on its head.

Re-reading the book, I found two things of significant interest. The first is that it is an almost perfect example of genre-blending. It reads just like a science fiction novel, but the internal logic is entirely magical. Nothing about the Vurt makes any sense scientifically, yet it is presented as if it is actual technology.

In addition Vurt illustrates very clearly just how glamorized most cyberpunk is. Traditional cyberpunk is all about gleaning chrome, black leather and mirror shades. The mean streets of Manchester are all about broken glass, dog shit and abusive relationships.

The re-read also got me wondering about the possible relationship between Vurt‘s Shadowcops and the Shadow Operators from Mike Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract series.

One area that the book club members focused on is disconnect between the cyberpunk style of the book and the Manchester setting. The characters tend to talk like they are in an American TV drama. I’m wondering how much of that was a conscious artistic decision by Noon, and how much was an attempt to appeal to the SF market.

We also got into a long discussion about the abusive relationships in Scribble & Desdemona’s family, how Scribble repeats those relationships after leaving home, and the meaning of the Thing as a Hobart-equivalent swap for Desdemona. Which just goes to show that top-rated SF can be very much about characters.