JUICING THE PIXELS - Story Notes for the Vurtlisters
By Jeff Noon, May 1999
The Project: As one novel comes to an end, Bill, my editor at Transworld, always takes me out and we discuss ideas for the next project. I'd just finished Nymphomation, the writing of which had caused me no end of problems, and I was looking for an easier option. "Why don't you give yourself a break," Bill said, "Collect your short stories together, maybe add a few more." Fine, okay, we can do that. Trouble is, when I got home and pulled down the old files, I found myself shaking my head in despair. Okay, there were a few good ideas here and there, but the short story craft was just not part of my repertoire. The novel allows me to go mad, to overindulge, and I've always thought my work comes out best when it's travelling along strange tangents. Also, in all honesty I was unhappy with the idea of just collecting old stuff together, it didn't seem to give value. I decided instead to write a whole load of new stories, just to see what would come out. Just to see if I could crack this short story thing. Of course, this was the exact opposite of the stated "easy option", but the truth is, I love to work.
First Draft: I took the few stories I could still believe in, arranged them in some kind of order, and then started to think about new stories that could fit between them. I'd come up with the idea of writing a book of stories that worked as a whole, with lots of links, mirror images, strange connections. Maybe a hidden narrative behind all the different tales. Also, I was determined to create something that would show off all my various writing skills, a book that revelled in style, in language, in meaning. A book of mysteries. Something curious and tantalising. Also, I wanted the book to contain some surprises, some tales of real life, if you will. I started to search through old files, old ideas books, jotting down new concepts on scraps of paper. Soon, I had enough to go on, and started to write. It happened remarkably quickly, given the range of material on view. Story led to story, as I took up the loose ends of one tale, made it into a new narrative. The golden number of fifty stories raised its head. Given the diversity of the book, its somewhat chaotic nature, putting exactly fifty stories in seemed a way of saying there was a governing principle behind it. I arranged the stories in some kind of vague order, from innocence to experience, and then sent it off to Bill for his thoughts.
Second Draft: Bill was enthusiastic on the whole, saying he liked the overall concept and the differing styles. He named some stories he wasn't too keen on (interestingly enough, these were earlier already-in-existence stories) and I either remixed these, or removed them all together. With the number fifty still in mind I now had to replace these with new stories. The main problem Bill had with the book was the order of the stories. He came up with the idea of splitting it into four sections, maybe with each section having its own title and feel. His idea was to start off with the more "normal" stories, and then work towards the weirder ones. Also, he thought that each section should mirror this process in miniature, normal to strange. I was keen on this idea, so I rearranged the stories accordingly, coming up with the four different titles, the four different concepts for each section. It was never going to make perfect sense, but at least the book started to have an overall shape.
Third Draft: Rereading it, I made a final decision about certain stories, deciding they just weren't up to scratch. Again, these had to be replaced, more work. Funnily enough, some of these last minute, quickly-written stories are perhaps the more interesting ones. But that's often the way. I'm a great fan of massive changes at the last minute! Anyway, the book was now complete. Here follows a few notes, thoughts, fantasies, about each story in turn, for anybody interested in this kind of opening out.
Prologue - Watch: A true story from my schooldays, of course, and written deliberately in a kind of faux naïve prose. (A little too "naïve" in retrospect.) I wanted to get across the feel of somebody just coming alive to the possibility of being creative. Who's the winner in this tale, the junior conman, or the kid who believes in non-existent objects? The story was first aired years ago in a comedy cabaret show called Arrested Laughter, and I also used to improvise it as the opening of the Automated Alice reading gigs. Please note that the name of the junior conman has been changed to protect the guilty.
The Shoppers: Written for the Waterstone's Diary 1997. It's difficult taking on a commission with so few words to play with. How to get across ideas, feelings, in so small a space. I liked this story a lot more when I first wrote it than I do now. Really, it comes out of what is happening to the shops of Manchester, which is becoming a kind of shopping theme town. I was just trying to inject a little bit of magic into the sterility. No more than that.
Solace: Written for the Big Issue, my second story for them. A live favourite this one, the style (told only in dialogue) making it very easy to read out loud. Also, a very simple but strong concept, I think. I love the idea of the soft drink that can be turned into any kind of flavour you want. Why doesn't somebody make this happen? In many ways a "typical" Jeff Noon story, in that it takes a mundane surreality, follows the consequences of it all the way through the darkness, and ends up (in the last sentence) reaching for the stars. The craziest moment in the writing is all to do with the computer as a creative tool. I'd chosen the six flavours of the drink, realised that the kid addicted to the stuff would call all six flavours mixed together a special name. I thought of taking the six initial letters of the fruits, making a new word out of them. All I could come up with was something like Solcal, the second L coming from Lime, I think. Of course, when I put the story through the Spellchecker, it comes up on this strange word, and asks me if I want to replace it with Solace. So of course I said yes! All I had to do now was find a fruit that began with the letter E, came up with elderberry, and that was it, the story made infinitely better through the use of technology!
The Cabinet of Night Unlocked: Absolutely one of my favourites, this. If I had to choose just one example of my writing to preserve, this would be a serious contender. How it came into being is interesting. I was reading Larry McMurtry's epic revisionist Wild West novel, Lonesome Dove. One of the main characters, a woman, is captured by the bad guys. She's strapped to the back of a pony, being led across the desert towards what she knows will be a hideous fate. In her delirium she wishes that she were already dead. The exact sentence is something like, "If only there was a way she could will her own death, she would do so. But of course, there was no such escape." I read this, read on a few sentences, and then backed up, feeling a rare excitement come over me. What if she could? The Big If. What if she could just kill herself, by willing it to happen? Then my thoughts started to spiral out: What if anybody could, what if any human being could kill themselves, quite painlessly, just shut down the body's mechanisms. What if, in fact, the body had an off switch? What if this was a perfectly natural part of the body's processes. But if so, why doesn't anybody know about it? Okay, it's suppressed knowledge; those in power have taken steps to keep the knowledge secret. From there it was simple to imagine an illegal book which detailed the method, and then to imagine the consequences if the knowledge became public. Thoughts of illegal manuscripts and secret rituals brought Jorge Luis Borges to mind, and as soon as that happened I was away. I decided to write the story unashamedly in his style. It more or less wrote itself in about a day, which always a sure sign of something working. My only regret about the story is that, although it is perfect to read out loud in front of an audience (given the nature of the ritual itself, its theatricality) I've only done it once. The truth is, it's just a bit too complex, and a bit too long, for a live audience to take in. A shame, but I have no doubt I shall have another go at it some time in the future. The character T.P Lechner, in the story, is loosely based on Timothy Leary. I was thinking of his revision of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide to LSD tripping.
Super-Easy-No-Tag-Special: A simple little tale of no real consequence beyond its central conceit. I've always been a fan of the Victorian Ghost Stories of M.R. James, and would often wonder if I could maybe do an update on his ideas. Reading about the criminal-tagging system in the newspaper provided the spark; a way to get a kind of technological ghost alive in the contemporary world. Strangeways is the real and rather wonderful name of the prison in Salford, just across the river from Manchester. The Smiths named their last album after it.
The Alphabox stories: Okay, it was a dream I had while working in the Manchester branch of Waterstone's bookshop. I was there for five years, during the last year of which I wrote Vurt. The dream of the man carrying the box of letters across the city is fairly obviously I think about my frustrations of working amongst so many books, and yet not being able to write one of my own. The first draft was written in the first person, male narrator, very much the same narrator as the Invisible Watch stories. It seemed too personal somehow, and changing it to third person, female narrator gave it the necessary fairy tale feel. The third and final episode segues into Junior Pimp. This was me trying to introduce the concepts of dance music into literature. I don't think it works, and if I could go back I would almost definitely remove these segues.
Metaphorazine: The bomb! I absolutely stand by this piece, despite the fact it doesn't always follow the true concepts of English Grammar. Pedants beware, your hearts are being strangled by your mind. A live favourite of course, although it works best with an introduction, rather than being read cold. I tell this story of how two reports in the press led me to the idea: one about young people not learning the basics of Grammar anymore, not reading anymore; and the other about young people taking more and more drugs. I say the obvious solution is to combine the two problems, and then introduce the piece as a Chemical Generation guide to the English Language. Complete nonsense of course. The idea just came from the word Metaphorazine popping into my head one day, and then me working out just what it meant. But I shall never forget the day I wrote it, the sheer excitement running through my head at the thing I was creating. Language, Arise!
Qwertyphobia: This is okay, I suppose. A nice idea, but could've been approached in a more subtle way. It was weird to read interviews with Fatboy Slim, about how his real name is Quentin, and how he hates it so much he changed it, first to Norman Cook, then to the Fatboy. Maybe we should send him the story? "Qwerty" is the word spelled out by the first six letters on the standard British keyboard layout.
Junior Pimp: A key text. A story that's been hanging around in my head for years. I think at the time somebody made a Hollywood film called Junior Doctor or Junior MD or Junior Something, and the new image flicked into my mind. I remember trying to get it down as a stage play, and then as a film script, but not getting very far with it. Pixel Juice turns out to be the natural home for it. I tried a number of different voices: first person interior monologue; voice of a friend; police report - before I came up with the tabloid press confessional idea. Then it just took off. Real easy to write. I like the structure of this, the way the various pieces fit together: a very traditional narrative in that sense. Some people have found this story a bit sleazy, it makes them uncomfortable, which is surely part of it. You've got to be real about these things. Also, I see the story as being essentially about innocence. I especially like the ending, the last line. It's my little dig at the whole "blame culture", "victim culture" thing. Sometimes, you know, we have to go through the bad, to get to the good. Something like that. Anyway, Junior Pimp is the first of the Shakespeare Estate stories, which are all about kids growing up, being changed by circumstance, living with the new. I was brought up in Ashton-Under-Lyne, just outside Manchester, and the nearby housing estate was called Crow Hill, and all the streets were named after areas in the Lake District: Penryth Avenue, Windermere Crescent, Keswick Avenue etc. Just these really downtrodden working class streets, named after these beautiful lakes! Some of the images are real: the arguments and all, and the fact that I could draw well. I used to copy half-naked women from adverts, take their clothes off with the pencil, you know. I'd draw these for other kids at the school, made me quite popular! Once I drew a large example on the blackboard before the teacher arrived. I got told off for that, dragged in to the headmaster's office. Oh yeah, I was Junior Pornographer! What a confession!
Shed Weapons: Entirely true story from my childhood. Actually, two or three separate stories drawn together. I made this up in the pub one night. Somebody asked me the usual question about how to write, and I just started improvising, telling these stories, showing how simple ideas can be joined together, to make something more interesting. Entirely true story I should add, except for one image. They weren't really flies in the box at the end, just chrysalises.
Homo Karaoke: I call this kind of story "Invisible Manga". In the first draft of Pixel, DJNA from the Disco Biscuits anthology, was in this position. Two things: I've never really rated DJNA at all, and secondly, I felt that too many people would have seen it already. So when City Life (Manchester's listings mag) asked me for a story, I came up with this. Again, a story that grew from the title, and the first of the "interior music" stories. A lot of the atmosphere in this came from reading Michael Bracewell's excellent England is Mine, his study of expressions of "Englishness" in pop culture, and the peculiar nature of suburban rock music. I like the opening, and the ending. The middle, especially the battle scene, I'm not so sure about. It could've been more controlled, less chaotic. Some lovely images though. Really, this story to me gives a prime example of the "problem" of a Jeff Noon story: that is, how on earth is it supposed to be read? A superficial reading of this leads one to think it's about music, club culture, the DJ life, virtual reality etc. Actually, that's only the dressing, the sparkle if you like. The key is to consider the ending carefully, and then to think about the scene where the narrator is towering above Manchester. Is this real? Is he really doing that? Or is it a fantasy? That's for the reader to decide, but I will say that at heart, like a lot of my work, this is a love story. It's about a guy who can conjure into being his thoughts, his fantasies. He's made his love appear from within himself. This is a hell of concept, when you think about it. I showed Mike Bracewell the story, and he got the gist of it immediately: he said it was my version of Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home a Heartache." Spot on!
Dub Karaoke: the first remix. The first step on what I imagine will become quite a long and I hope interesting road for me. What happens here, I take the Homo Karaoke story, I strip it down on screen to its essential images. Break these into words, phrases, juggle them around, looking for a new hit. Start to build it up again. The phrases started to naturally fall into three-line stanzas, and it came to me that I was actually trying to write haiku, the Japanese poetry form. Then its just a matter of getting them to work as a page, as a text, as a shimmer of meaning. I fully understand that some people just won't get this at all, and that's fine. We all move to different drummers. I've just seen from the dictionary that Haiku means "amusement verse". This kind of ties in with the weird music adverts in the above story, which are meant to be examples of bad Japanese translations, the kind you see in instruction manuals. So, it all (accidentally) makes a kind of sense!
Bug Compass: Well, of course I like this one. It means a lot to me, emotionally I mean. On the Pixel tour I really got into this story, just reading it out loud, putting everything into it. When I did it in Manchester, you could've heard a pin drop and at the end, I was in tears. Strange. Anyway, this came out of writing the Vurt playscript for the Contact Theatre, which will be on in the year 2000 some time. In a play, you have to replace all the car chases and the gun shootouts with emotion, with a refocus onto the relationships. And the main relationship in the play, and the book, is between Scribble and Beetle. I mean, what's really going on between these two guys? That's the subtext. The story itself started as an abandoned first chapter for a novel, just that first page describing the bug hunt. I turned the two names into Beetle and Scribble, and the rest was easy. I like the 3/4 waltz rhythm of the opening line. And I love that line near the end, referring to the dead insect, "Beetles don't live very long, do they?" You have to read that line, and then think about Vurt, the novel.
Fetish Booth #7: Not sure about this one. It doesn't really have a narrative, just a series of events, and then a downbeat ending. If I were to remix this, I'd follow Janus right through the curtain, see what happened to him in there, maybe let him escape his destiny somehow. Some kind of transcendence. Or maybe not. Whatever. Killing off characters for no real reason always gets me down. This story should be read in tandem with Somewhere the Shadow; they both take place on the same night, New Years Eve, both climaxing at the midnight bells.
Pimp, the Boardgame: A strange one. What's the motivation behind this? I don't know, really. Just a mad idea I had, made something of it. I think it has a kind of value, a kind of secret truth about it. And it's cruel, in a way. Really, the whole thing hinges on the Exotica items. And of course, it gives a hint that Janus Fontaine might well survive his fate in the previous story.
Chromosoft Mirrors: Quite a few people have mentioned that they like this one. It started out as a frustration about how computers designers never seem to make the leap; they just keep fiddling with the traditional concept. In the first draft it was actually called Microsoft Mirrors, but Transworld were a bit worried about that. I did an anagram, came up with Cromisoft, and then to the present title. It ties in with the concept of the Dodos in Vurt and Pollen; the small percentage who can no longer dream. And also with the next story…
Cloudwalkers: Again, this features a character who can't dream, or in this case, can't be affected by the subliminal adverts. I completely realise this story goes on a bit too long for such a simple and somewhat clichéd theme, but I like it. I like the ending a whole lot, and I hope the shock of it somehow makes up for the exposition. This is an example of me writing on the hoof, so to speak. I just got the idea, and started writing. No thought, no planning. Just following word with word until it finished. So the ending took me by complete surprise. I think this comes across in the rawness of the writing.
Blurbs: Okay, we've entered a little subsection of stories, all dealing with artificial life. This was written for the excellent Pulp Faction people, for one of their anthologies of weirdness, Random Factor. This is another of those stories I liked a lot more when I first wrote it. This version is substantially remixed from the original, losing a lot of its final pages. I like to think this is an improvement. The story came out of three sources. I was reading Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control", about emergent systems and complexity theory, which kept referring to anthills and beehives as natural examples of the phenomenon. Also, I was reading a short story called The Sandkings (sorry, can't remember the author's name [George R.R. Martin -- ed]), a science fiction story about a strange new breed of insect. And thirdly I was writing the blurb for Automated Alice. (Oh yeah, we get asked to write our own blurbs!) I was thinking what a great word Blurb is, with a real organic feel. And then: what a great name for an insect. The story arrived. Of course, the blurbflies really come into their own later on in Nymphomation, but this was the birthplace.
Dub Blurbs: the second remix. Not as successful as some of the others, maybe. But the concept was growing; how each dub version had to find its own form, in this case the press release. Some nice images are frown up: Desire tactics are cloud-swallowed!
Tweedles: This was written for the Guardian newspaper, who wanted me to give them a Christmas story, believe it or not. They put an illustration with it, that really brought this theme home: the main character carrying the perfume bottles like the gift of the magi, and the wandering star coming to rest over the house. Another story that grew out its title. And once again, this is heavily remixed from the original.
Marilyn Monroe: Just a joke, to tie in with the artificial life theme.
Xtrovurt: Another favourite, and great fun to read out loud. This was written for the people at Bullets of Autumn - www.bulletsofautumn.co.uk - a group based in Wales, who were working on a roleplaying game based on the Vurt novels. This is more or less done, but they can't find a buyer for it, as yet. Anyway, I've played a version of it, and I really rate it. Their site is full of weird stuff relating to their knowledge of the game. If I have any questions of a factual nature about my own work, these are the people I call! They had managed to work out details for all the character types - Vurt, Shadow, Pure and Dog - all except the Robos. They said to me, "They're not really just robots are they?" and I answered, "No, not really". But I didn't have a clue what they really were! So I wrote this, and the following story, just for the Bullets. The atmosphere is taken from my first reading tour of the United States, my experience of New York City. Which I love, by the way, despite the sleaziness of the story.
The Perfumed Machine: A kind of scientific refocusing of the previous story. The ending of this, and the ending of Chromosoft Mirrors, are deliberate mirror images of each other.
Instructions: This is my version of Borges' The Sect of the South, from his collection, Fictions. In that story he gave himself the task of describing a ritual, without actually saying what it was. Now, I don't know if Borges really had a certain process in mind, but I definitely know the secret device of my story. Of course, I'm not going to give it away.
Getting Home Safely: Another true story. Or should I say, a true dream. I had this dream a long time ago, and it stuck with me. I like to see it as being one of the earliest starting points for the concept of Vurt.
Pixel Face: A key text. Another glimpse of the early life and work of Miss Hobart, and Jazir Malik of course. But it's the voice that dominates, the voice of the narrator. Writing a story, a novel, really the first job is finding the right voice for it. I read this out loud in a really stupid Manchester voice, and the audience cracks up, especially at the first page. I like the morality of this story, the self-contained morality of a group of outlaws. To write, you have to become open to ideas. You have to be able to watch a programme on the television showing young offenders with their faces masked by pixels, and think to yourself, "I wonder what would happen if it wasn't his face behind it?" I don't have any secrets about how to become good at creating ideas, but I do know that the more you do it, the more open you become to the process. Pretty soon, you can't see hardly anything at all, without asking, "What if?" What if, what if, what if. Once the primary image is in place, you decide where in the story it belongs, what its emotional import is, and then work up to, and away from it. "Time's winged security guard" is a pastiche of a line from Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress."
Stigmatica: An offshoot of the previous story. A simple little revamp of an old, old theme. The Mark of Cain. I remember reading a story about a guy who kills a tattoo artist, only to find that the tattoo starts to grow all over his body. Shameless plagiarism, really.
Autopsy of a Hummingbird: My favourite title of all my works. The story doesn't do the title justice, and I'm not sure in retrospect about the sexual politics of the piece. Strangely enough, this was an offshoot of the Xtrovurt story: the idea being that each robo had this machine inside their stomach, that had to be fed through the abdominal mouth. The robos actually called it their "pimp", I don't know why. Anyway, the idea escaped that story, took on a (somewhat sleazy) life of its own. Make of it what you will.
The Book of Nymphomation: A very early, and very different draft, of Nymphomation was going to contain pages from this strange encyclopaedia. This is as far as I got with it.
Somewhere the Shadow: Well, what can I say? I had the weirdest feelings while writing this one. Again, a story which unfolded in the telling, with no plan. The idea came out of me mispronouncing the word Pheromones. Phero-nomes. Phero-gnomes. Oh, how perversity arises out of trivia! Like Xtrovurt and Hummingbird, I class this as a very "English" story, concerned with our national fixation on sexuality as a separate entity from the body. I could maybe argue that I'm trying to heal that rift, by focussing on it. But I'm not sure how powerful merely "focussing" is. And I wouldn't mind, but then I have to go and introduce a serial child-murderer! Stacking the odds. Does the ending justify the trawl through the gutter? I don't know, but I will say that I view my work as being essentially moral. I think that's why I'll never be "controversial"; no matter how far down I go into the darkness, somehow or other I try to allow the narrative to pull me back out. A glimmer of hope. The biscuit factory that turns up in this and some of the other stories is the McVities factory near where I lived in Manchester. It was a good mile away, but at certain times, especially at night for some reason, you could smell the baking process. The air thick with the aroma of wheat, oats and chocolate. The cop is called Kinsey after the famous Kinsey Report into Sexuality.
Call of the Weird: One of my very first short stories, written for the Big Issue. I like it still, if only for sentimental reasons. A little bit of editing took place for the Pixel version.
Dub Weird: Fun. I do it live, singing it. Well, chanting it. The audience is always shocked, or maybe embarrassed. I can't sing, not really. If I could sing, I wouldn't write. Everything I do, it's just me trying to sing. Keep that in mind as you read my stuff, it's the real key. "Natty furlocks and ting" is a reggae kind of phrase. Listen to Anthea and Donna's hit, "Uptown Top Ranking" for the proper usage.
The Charisma Engine: This had an interesting genesis. I was asked to contribute a story to the British Council's annual anthology of new writing. I did a real complicated thing involving cyber skateboarders, kids with no shadows, and tied it all into this mad idea that this evil company were resurrecting Princess Diana! Yeah, it was the anniversary of her death, got me thinking about charisma as a form of energy. The most photographed person in the world, and all that. I showed it to a few people, they all said it was too much, too over the top. So I removed all the references to the charisma engine, leaving the story "Oblivion Girls", which is in the New Writing anthology volume eight. The charisma idea lay around as a pile of notes for a while, until I got the idea of presenting it as an H.G. Wells pastiche. This isn't really my forte, but like I said I wanted Pixel Juice to be a real showcase for my talents, with lots of different styles on offer. I do think it's got some lovely lines in it, and a strong overall feel. It's amazing how many people don't pick up on the fact it's narrated by a man called Newne.
Spaceache and Heartships: This central image (the young boy with the moon in his stomach) has been on my mind for a good number of years. At various times I would have another go at finding a place for it. I'm not sure how successful this version is, maybe it's too light for the real poetic power of the image. Still, nice title. Selene is the Greek goddess of the moon. The last line of the story is an unashamed homage to J.G. Ballard. This is, to my mind, the "weirdest" story in the book. Everything after this is the winding down, the coming to earth.
Dubships: This is my favourite of all the remixes, in the sense that I think it really adds something to the original story; gives it a heart, a soul, if you will. Again, I have been known to "sing" this one live. Sometimes I get asked the question, who am I writing for? Do I have a particular, ideal reader in mind. Well, yes, I do. It's not a real person, just an image in my head. She's female, twenty-one years old. And she gets every single nuance of my work! Let me illustrate: the first section of Pixel Juice is called Illusion's Perfume. In this Dubships remix, there's a line "illusion's ascent". My ideal reader realises straight away that this is a pun: "illusion's ascent" equals "illusion's a scent". Illusion is a perfume: illusion is a scent. Don't worry if you didn't get this: the ideal reader is a mythological figure!
Specimens: I was always a bit embarrassed by this story; to my mind it was a little too "adolescent", if you see what I mean. Like a very bad Salvador Dali painting. But so many people have responded positively to it, I now realise I've somehow tapped into something quite deep here. But don't ask me to explain what this story means, I neither know nor care. It works as a kind of visual poem. For some reason I connect this story to Cloudwalkers. They both seem to take place in the same mental landscape. This and the following two stories are designed to work as a trilogy.
Creeping Zero: This is good, I like this one. I always introduce this at readings as the story that most expresses my (rainy day) feelings about Manchester. It started with the first line, "Tonight we caught five", just going round and round my head. I had to give a voice to it, let it play out, tell its story. It's not a particularly nice story, of course, and recent events like the nail-bombings in London, have made me reconsider the story's meaning. In one sense, it doesn't matter at all just what it is that's being captured, what matters is the internal narrative of the young man accepting his place, his role within the society. It's a story about how boys become men (and girls, women), in macho cities like Manchester. That said, we should still think about the actual act that leads to this acceptance, this giving up of individuality. Just what has been lost, what gained? The story circles around this mysterious act, and to give too much away would be to simply close the story down.
Crawl Town: One of my favourites. This was the last story written for the collection. I threw one story out at the last moment, and had only a couple of days to replace it. The story I rejected was called "The Factory", a commission for Arena magazine that they didn't use. I'm not surprised, and quite thankful they didn't, because it wasn't a very good story. All I took from it was the central image of the Factory that ran its own production. I searched through my files, and found the beginning of another story (I have lots of discarded beginnings), the first paragraph of Crawl Town. It suddenly hit me I could combine the factory idea with this location setting. The story flowed out quite naturally, with me just picking up ideas along the way, and I think this really comes across in the telling. Can I just say this story contains my favourite sentence, the one about the fridge light and the toilet flush. The ending illustrates a concept I've been thinking about a lot lately; the idea that transcendence in a narrative can be achieved through language, as well as event. Okay, the girl looks into the sphere at the end. Obviously, I don't want to reveal what's inside the sphere. If I'd written, simply, "I looked into the sphere," I think there would have been a sense of anti-climax. But giving her the line, "I set my eye to ignition," allows the story to flare outwards, upwards. That's the theory anyway. My older brother, Jimmy, was involved in the very early days of commercial robotics, and his first prototype was called, yes, Oris.
Orgmentations; Walking through Soho in London, seeing all the young people with their metal piercings, and suddenly thinking, "What would robots pierce themselves with?"
Hands of the DJ: The spark for this comes from the work of Kodwo Eshun, a dance music theorist. I was reading an article by him, all about DJ culture, and he mentioned that the increasingly dextrous skills of the DJ may well be part of an evolutionary process. Okay, let's take that idea to its logical (illogical?) conclusion. I'd got the story down to the last moment, before the taking off of the second glove. I then asked my friends what they thought was inside it. "Butterflies," said Doug Rushkoff, author of The Ecstasy Club.
Bassdust: In the first draft this was simply an advert for the dust. I was booked to do a reading in Brighton, and the night before I did a quick rewrite to make it suitable for live performance. The audience loved it, so it stuck.
Rock Star's Limousine: The first of a little trio of stories all about mirrors. This is actually quite complex for its length, containing as it does three layers of narrative: the first drive; the second drive; the scientific report. All three stories are told at the same time. The spark for this was an article in Wire magazine by the musician and author, David Toop. He describes a car trip in which the music on the tape player accidentally coincides with each different moment of the journey. To my mind, the story reads a little like a Ballard tale.
Hyper Alice: Of no consequence. But the little footnote at the end is quite amusing.
The Silvering: This is a great concept, underused. But maybe it's better for being so short. Certainly, I don't think I've packed so many ideas into such a small space before. I might well return to this idea at a later date. One of my first jobs was silvering mirrors. It's a highly toxic chemical mixture, and we had to wear these special masks to stop the fumes getting into our lungs. Imagine that, silvering the inside of your lungs. Mirrored lungs! You see now, I just can't stop the "what if" process.
Before It Disappears: Perhaps the most science fictional of the stories in the book. I'm not too keen on this. It was written a long time ago (for Raise, a student magazine), in another universe almost. Still, the ending is good, and leads nicely into the final section of the book. The idea of packing ideas away, one by one…
Pixel Dub Juice: The final remix. This went through a lot of changes. At first it was a remix of the whole book, performed by DJ Pixel Juice herself. But that didn't really work. I can't remember where the idea of doing the limericks came from. I love the line "acrobatic alphabetics", which is what it is, if you see what I mean. Jorge Luis Borges is, of course, Argentinean. A Spanish tongue, in other words. So his middle name is pronounced "Lou-eeesss." Now that doesn't rhyme with screwy or gooey. It only way the rhyme works is by giving his middle name a French pronunciation, "Lou-ee". Sorry about that, it was too good to throw away.
Night Shopping: The first person to read my work is always my partner, Julie. Usually she's very objective in her comments, simply pointing out mistakes, suggesting improvements etc. But when I read through the first draft, reading her comments, in large red letters she had scrawled at the top of this story, "This is beautiful!" Well, I was taken aback somewhat, but yeah, you know what, she's right.
Epilogue - Watch: Again, all completely true, I swear. I often wonder what the junior conman is doing these days. The last I heard, he was selling "air" guitars at heavy metal gigs.
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Thanks for reading, and listening.
Jeff X