Pixel Juice

by Jeff Noon

'In the first shop they bought a packet of dogseed, because Doreen had always wanted to grow her own dog...'

Pixel Juice is the collected outpourings of an overactive mind. A selection of fifty stories from Jeff Noon's head, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain wierd.

From the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of music culture, Jeff Noon samples the image mix. Product recalls, adverts for mad gadjets, dubcut prose remixes, urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, almost-true tales, dreamy one-pagers, word-dizzy roller coasters. With new stories from the Vurt cycle and other revelations, including the discovery of an 'off' switch for the human body this newly revised edition marks the first time that Pixel Juice has been made available digitally.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

287 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy.

He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion,

Vurt, was the hippest sci-fi novel to be published in Britain since the days of Michael Moorcock in the late sixties.

Like Moorcock, Noon is not preoccupied with technology per se, but incorporates technological developments into a world of magic and fantasy.

As a teenager, Noon was addicted to American comic heroes, and still turns to them for inspiration. He has said that music is more of an influence on his writing than novelists: he 'usually writes to music', and his record collection ranges from classical to drum'n'bass.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all time ever favourite books. I must have bought it at least four times, because I have this terrible tendency to give it away to amazing people that I think will appreciate it. In fact, right now there are two copies on my bookshelf sitting next to each other because I couldn't resist buying it in the library (for twenty pence!) just in preparation for when I meet someone else who really should read this. In fact, thinking about it, I think I know who my second copy should go to.

Anyway: the book itself is incredible. It's a hyper-modern, hyper-real, hyper-active whirlwind of drugs, music and glimpses into our strangely discordant future. Set in Manchester (of course!), Noon's stories, poems and intricate word-play are all incredibly inventive and innovative. He crams more ideas into some of his stories than you find in other writers entire novels. These modern day fairytales are often bleak but are always enthralling.

I would recommended someone new to Jeff Noon to start with these short stories. I do enjoy his books too, but for me these short stories are his pinnacle.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't understand how Jeff Noon hasn't been on my radar all these years. The first few brief pieces impress with their surprising ideas and wordplay, and sly humor. The next batch of stories are longer and more conventional. Despite a few duds, there's plenty to enjoy in the huge range of approaches and materials. "Bug Compass" for example is like a jaundiced '90s Brit take on Ray Bradbury's Americana, darker and more ironic.

The wild ideas just keep coming. "Cloudwalkers" has young people addicted to video games, occasionally infected with deadly mind-control viral ads that are transmitted by malicious parties. "Somewhere the Shadow" discusses the digital (!) separation of sexual offenders and their pathological desires.

The brief pieces are often disposable but still enjoyable. I don't think this will be my last book from Jeff Noon.

[Silenius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not all stories are great, but some are brilliant. Overall a good introduction to Jeff Noon and fun reading.

[Timons Esaias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the previous century, when I was a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, I attended Eastercon in Liverpool, and heard Jeff Noon read his short fiction story "Metaphorazine." I went straight to the dealer's room, and asked what book it was in, and bought it. I have since used the story several times in teaching, have read it at our annual Passage Party, and so on. I started reading Pixel Juice itself and got about 75 pages in, enjoyed it, and then, foolishly, put it aside for later to savor.

That's basically a fatal mistake in this household, where books can languish for decades before being picked up again, as happened here. I do wish I'd continued, and also moved on to Vurt (which I bought on the strength of my partial reading of Pixel Juice), and generally kept up with the Jeff Noon phenomenon.

Ah, well. I finally got tired of meaning to get back to it, and got back to it. It's an amusing read, and is the kind of science fiction and surreal fiction that I enjoy, in which the imagination is allowed to run wild. There are stories that are lyrics, pieces that are raps, stories that appear to be advertisements, others that pretend to be news reporting or history. It's an amusing grab-bag of goodies, all framed by the tragic tale of the invisible watch.

"Metaphorazine" is still my favorite, but "Crawl Town" and "Special Promotion -- Hyper-Alice" are close behind. "Junior Pimp" is certainly unexpected, and many others kept me turning the pages. My one disappointment is "Spaceache and Heartships" which has a really excellent beginning (Earth is discovered to have a second Moon, in stationary orbit over Manchester, England, 24 feet above the ground), but the ending did not, for this reader, really pay off that premise.

My high compliment is that much of this reminds me of Stanislaw Lem, at least in the type of imagination. It doesn't surprise me that the self-review (included as a piece in the collection) claims it was all ripped off from Jorge Luis Borges.

I will now strive to read Vurt in the next few months, to move on to other Noonities, and to play the entirety of "Pixelkids Come Out Tonight" as the opening theme to my every writing session.

[Alien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Viele, meist kurze Stories. Vom Stil und der Art her recht unterschiedliche Sachen. Von Pseudo-Berichten aus einer Parallelwelt, die unserer ähnlich ist, bis zu poetischen Unverständlichkeiten.
Man kann aber alles als "phantastisch" bezeichnen. Der Grundton ist eher humorvoll.
Diverse Stories würden gut ins "Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" passen.

Offenbar handelt es sich bei Jeff Noon um einen "Kultautoren", von dem ich aber bisher nichts gehört hatte. Und leider war es nicht mein Ding. Abgebrochen auf S. 140 / 316

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eclectic mix of stories, ranging in quality.

The story that stands out for me, even after all these years, is "Solace". A fascinating imagining of a new but potentially devestatingly addictive product that emerges from the children's soft drink industry.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnny loves Metaphorazine. Every clockwork day.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

7c. Unprotected dispersal can lead to infection of receptacle.
—"Instructions for the Use of," p.158

I waited for Jeff Noon's Pixel Juice for a long time—I've had this collection on my to-read list since before Goodreads even existed, in fact. But I'd never even seen a copy in the wild until just a few months ago, when I traveled to the far-off realm of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and dropped into the fabulous Uncle Hugo's, a fannish wonderland filled with all manner of new and used science fiction and fantasy (and mysteries too, though I didn't get over to Uncle Edgar's side). So many SF&F books and magazines, games and ephemera, well-organized but still cramming the shelves and overflowing into the aisles... ahhh, truly this venerable bookstore is nothing less than a bibliophile's heaven!

This is an entirely unsolicited and uncompensated plug, by the way, prompted purely by the pleasure of shopping there. If you're ever in the Twin Cities, do make some time to visit.

So, on to the book itself. Pixel Juice is very, very busy, and very much a product of its time (published in 1998, in what turns out to be a very solid Doubleday hardback edition). The front matter, page numbers and chapter titles appear in a stylized and now-dated font, flashy and pixelated, that often approaches total unreadability. Fortunately, the body of the book is set in some boring old readable book face. No idea which one, but it's got serifs and everything.

Pixel Juice's Table of Contents contains a whopping 49 items. Of course, that means most of them are short—most are no more than vignettes, in fact (the sort of thing that gets called "flash fiction" these days) or even poems (not very good ones—sorry, Jeff!)—although there are a few longer pieces leavening the mix. Reading Pixel Juice, I kept getting flashbacks to the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, which (in its heyday, the 1990s) occasionally did truly justify its name. (This is not a bad thing, by the way...)

All of the stories in Pixel Juice are connected—though some very loosely—into a larger narrative, whose features will be familiar to anyone who has read Noon's more widely-available novels Vurt or Pollen. This is a dystopian, cyberpunk future (of sorts), centred on the city of Manchester, England, and in particular on the (perhaps mythical) Shakespeare Estate, where all the streets are named after characters in the great man's plays—though no one who lives there could tell you which ones. The economy's gone to hell, to be sure, but there are feathers you can use to tickle yourself into virtual realities, music that worms itself into your brain and heart, and other bizarre technophiliac exotica to remind us that we aren't exactly in mundane reality anymore. This is Jeff Noon at his surreal, transgressive best—if you like his work at all, you'll like Pixel Juice.

I think it's important to view Pixel Juice as an artifact of its time, though—its pre-Millennial jitters and preoccupation with rave culture remind me of the film Strange Days, in fact. Viewed as such, this is a great book, both expanding upon and commenting about the universe Noon built for us elsewhere and at greater length. It's worth a look—if you can even find a copy, in these strange days...

[PDExperiment626 · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I am not normally a fan of short stories, I absolutely loved the tales presented in Pixel Juice. [return][return]Pixel Juice takes place in Jeff Noon's Manchester universe and contains stories touching upon the characters/plot from his other works therein. While each story is self-contained, there is an underlying coherence to Pixel Juice that ties together aspect of Noon's other works (i.e. 'Vurt', 'Pollen', 'Automated Alice', 'Nymphomation' and 'Needle in the Groove').[return][return]What I like about these short stories is that they take a single, interesting idea and explore a consequence of that idea. Noon doesn't fall into the trap of trying to write a very short novel and pass it off as a short story. The emphasis isn't on plot or characters, it's on ideas that have impact in Noon's universe and have consequently helped form the background mythology of his Manchester/Vurt setting. As a result, the stories are typically short with a very directed focus, giving them more 'staying power' with me as a reader (as opposed to other short stories). [return][return]Another interesting aspect to these stories is that Noon bounces in perspective and between first and third person views. His prose ranges from pretentious academic, to drugged-out stream of consciousness; and it's all very convincing. Noon is a true wordsmith and Pixel Juice conveys that beautifully.[return][return]If you are a fan of Noon's other works, then reading Pixel Juice is a must. While Pixel Juice can be read without reading any other book taking place in the Vurt universe, much of the subtle relevance of the stories will be lost. Overall, it's a wonderful collection full of interesting ideas and tie-ins to the Vurt universe.

[Howard Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first taste of Jeff Noon, and it's a really nice collection of stories. I guess about 40% of them are thumbnail sketches of characters that appear in the Vurt series or his other novels - there are two or three little universes that a lot of the stories (and there are a lot - about 50) revolve around. All the stories have a very English quality about them, although a couple feel like mutations of other people's writing (The Charisma Engine made me think of The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward by HP Lovecraft, for example, and others feel like Philip K Dick short stories - neither of those are bad things!).

They are mostly very dense in terms of the number of ideas packed into them, and the amount of background detail just thrown in. In some cases, they are perhaps a little too dense and breathless in their inventiveness, but he's certainly not phoning it in. The ones I actually found most appealing were a few of the short standalone stories - the letter delivery man, the cages, the pheronomes...

[Crow Greiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this book tumble and dive and trickle into each other, leapfrog, eddy, spin, and loop back. It is a playful river of sharp glass and funhouse mirrors. I could say that it's surreal and (cyber)punk, but that's about as descriptive as saying the ocean is "big" and "wet" and leaving it at that to someone who has never seen it.

[Roman Tilcer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supr, zábavný, vynalézavý, hravý, bavilo mě to velice.

[Matt Puz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: not quite what it once was

Original review:

This book is a mind-bending, reality questioning, linguistic circus. It's like waking up in the future from a dream in the past and not quite knowing when is now. I appreciated this on so many levels: the inventiveness of the stories, the wit and humor, the spinning of words and their meanings, the cyber-future horror show. And it all goes a little something like this:

The year is 2100.
You’re still flesh and blood, mostly. Large swaths of you and your cohorts are twisted metal, chrome-scape and titanium terrain. But the tribal biology still pushes you to the cave, over the edge into the rave-light, gyroscopic in the heat and the beat, the sonic shamanic vision laced in shadow.
She appears almost out of nowhere, blended by laserlight. She’s trouble in a midriff, treble in the midrange, ass heavy as the bass. The volume swells. What do you stand to gain?
“Take this.” And it’s a love song.
Reality bends. Humanity ends. The machine in you pulses like a drum. Slave to the wire. Sight is a great bird folding you in feathery down.
It’s the alarm. Sunbeam supernova through the shades. A bedroom? It’s morning...and only a dream.
As feathers fall from your pillow.

[mims · Rating 4 out of 5]

my fav stories were those where something sad is lurking below the surface. “crawl town” is eerie and sublime. i’m a sucker for strange factories producing mystery and misery. and parallel machines. and the machines being a metaphor for this collection as a whole:

“i call them games; there wasn’t any obvious way of playing them. you just had to find your way around them, work out what they were for, try to unravel their mystery as you went along”

ps: isn’t there a short story by harlan ellison possibly about another cursed factory of some sort? and ofc my favorite, oyamada’s “the factory.”

other highlights:
“somewhere the shadow” (a crazed jaunt through our carceral and perverse panopticons) “cloudwalkers,” (the samizdat from infinite jest, hardboiled evil-lite version) “the charisma engine” (VURTual miss havisham reunited with her lover), and “spaceache and heartships” (curse youuuu neil armstrong!!!!).

“pixel dub juice” sums up the whole collection (literally. it’s a summary.) despite being surreal and wacky and trippy, the collection was very coherent. a successor to borges indeed. the blurb at the back is right: “ideas per page dangerously close to the limit!”


and the puns are great too.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

there were a couple of really quite conceptually interesting stories here about advertising, genetic modification, automation, and consumer desires. but in the end I was put off by the self-consciously lurid pulp style. we get it, drugs and pimps and street crime are the dark underbelly of the enchanting techno-utopia, but that is not an interesting or new thing to say, not in itself, and the treatment of violence and transgression here was simply shallow and sensationalist and juvenile. also the writing about the rave scene has possibly just not aged well, but I think it would've been pretty vicariously embarrassing for me even in the 90s.

[Sunayna]

Very, very, very, very recommended. I wish I could spin fairytales like he does. Superbly random, fresh and absolutely compelling.

[7thTrooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tyvärr så var ju inte Noon lika briljant i novell-formatet som han har varit som roman-författare. Det är fortfarande bra, men det är inte i närheten av hans längre verk. Magin infinner sig inte, riktigt. De bästa i Pixel Juice kan mäta sig med de bästa i Vurt eller A Man of Shadows men tyvärr så är medelnivån mycket lägre. Språket är fortfarande bra till briljant men det hela tänder aldrig riktigt till trots detta och Jeff Noons alltid sprudlande fantasi. För konstigt är det, precis så konstigt som jag förväntade mig.

[James Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of short speculative-fiction stories. Some great gems in here along with other stories that feel more like ideas, Jeff Noons writing doesn't feel dated even though this short story collection was published over 25 years ago.

A lot of cyberpunky goodness, along with a few more indulgent writer-y stories which I didn't like as much.

A good introduction into Jeff Noons universes. (Nooniverse?)

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt ahead of it's time, capturing the atmosphere of remix culture it creates dystopian, wonderful worlds which come together throughout the short stories and intertwine between pages.

Not all of the stories are great but some are amazing, and leave you thinking about them for days, Noon's mind is really full of wonder. It's the kind of book that leaves you looking at the world in a slightly brighter, holographic light.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really fun short story collection.
Not my favourite of Jeff Noons work (which was always vurt, but is now being rivaled by dom dom domino's!)

Worth a read if you're already a fan of noon's work. His style of writing whether writing a book, a short story, or even just a short poem in a tweet is always spot on.

[Luke Feistamel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to find. I finally did pick up a copy in a used book store a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised when I read it. I could not get into Vurt or some other Noon novels, but these short stories are so inventive and fresh I had difficulty putting it down.

[Liam Ostermann]

Jeff Noon is a English writer who emerged in the 1990s out of the Manchester acid house scene (which is probably an insulting reductive description) and who I haven't read but mean to, so this post is to remind me that he is an author I must read.

[Lizzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely weird.

[Nick Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

short stories. Some ok some not particularly interesting

[Chris Bookley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Microcosms.

[Esha · Rating 4 out of 5]

iconic. science fiction yearns for people like noon.

[Rob Frampton · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF

[Gumbo Ya-ya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the best single-author collection of short fiction I have ever read. It's not that the individual stories are each amazing, though many of them are excellent; it's the all the individual pieces are wrapped together to create a single coherent (in some senses, anyway...) work that precludes looking at it as a collection of parts.

Pixel Juice reads like a collection of fragments, historical artefacts both factual and mythic, loving, painstakingly gathered by a dedicated team of anthropologists trying to piece together the evolution of the late twentieth century into one of the queerest futures ever imagined. This work explores the roots of Noon's novels Vurt, Pollen, and Nymphomation: the characters, the settings, the themes, the language. It is an excellent introduction to Noon as a writer, but also offers significant depth to the reader who is already familiar with the twisted imaging he has brought forth in his long-form work.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give this 5 stars, but I really can't. I devoured this while waiting for "Vurt" to come in the mail and loved (almost) every minute of it, except for a few scattered duds (Junior Pimp, most of Part 4). When I finished the last page, I flipped back to find which of the stories I thought were the real gems to share them with friends, only to find that on second thought none of them really jumped out at me. Solace and Cloudwalkers, maybe, but even those didn't capture the general excitement I felt reading it. The trippy robot DJ sequences were really fun to read once I got into them, but I didn't want to revisit them. Then I realized that that's just it -- reading this book is a wonderful whirlwind of crazy dreams and awesomely nonsensical images, but once you've read it, the candy is gone and only the wrapper is left. Or at least, that's how it feels to me.

[Bill Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odd, enjoyable collection of fifty short, somewhat related, tales of worlds where feathers are drugs, robots are sexy, and Disc Jockeys spin ancient records with hands made of butterflies. The fiction is drowning in surrealism, which is usually a good thing. The array of styles on display here can best be described as indescribable. The best pieces are the ones that manage to weave in at least a smidgen of human feelings into the ebb and flow of the usual strangeness.

This is the first book of Noon's that I have read. I liked it enough to move onto Vurt - which I have heard very good things about.