[Vurt 02] • Pollen

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*.