2025 Reading Challenge 28 Vurt
“Mandy came out of the Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies…” and so begins Vurt. Vurt
I wrote this review after a campaign of The Electric State Free League roleplaying game, so excuse the comparisons between them.
Vurt is the dog mess of a post-human England, a psychotropic poem scrawled in code and gutter jargon.
If, suppose, The Electric State tabletop RPG presents a slow-motion endgame nostalgia rotting beneath sun-bleached highways and weaponised consumer relics. Then, Vurt is its infected offspring, born screaming into a broken neural feed. Both explore disintegrating realities, but where Electric State is an elegy to the 90s that was, Vurt is the 90s psychosis made real.
The feathers, like Neurocasters in Electric State, offer a sinister transaction: memory for transcendence, identity for fiction. Jeff Noon’s landscape isn’t necessarily ruined; it’s reprogrammed. It is Detroit replaced by Manchester, stripped of Brutalism and rebuilt with twitching neurons and synthetic desire. Here, the story and prose are a virus. Rules shift. Infected NPCs bleed out.
Vurt lacks Electric State’s lonely stillness. Bleakness. There are no pauses for awe. Instead, characters chase a vanished girl through fevered datastreams and splintering street lore, like PCs trapped in an open-world hallucination, unable to exit. They aren't exploring; they are integrated with the system, unable to distinguish real and unreal.
Ballard would recognise this terrain: architecture as neurosis, technology as erotic decay, the self dissolved into binary form. Vurt isn’t world-building; it’s memory-scratched onto a disk.
In play, The Electric State invites empathy through its slowness. Vurt denies such luxury. It is not a game, it is the system crashing mid-session, it’s a GM replaced by a glitching AI whispering dead dreams through speaker static.
Read Vurt not for its story, but for its texture. Like Electric State, it leaves you altered, though in Vurt, the scars bleed.
Oof, somewhat carried away there, excuse my literary indulgence.
I read Vurt near to when it came out in the 90s, and I don’t think I ever finished it. This time I did. I got a lot more out of it than I did the first time around. I still think it’s a difficult read, it’s poetic, rambling, dense, a fairly unlikeable central character, and a morally dubious pursuit. The phrase style of over-substance keeps coming up in my head, it does feel hollow, IF you compare it to other greats of the cyberpunk genre - Gibson, Stephenson and Dick.
But maybe that’s not the point, it IS original, it has some fantastic worldbuilding, and it is overflowing with imagination, it leads you on a Journey and like The Electric State, the Journey is the point, not necessarily anything deeper or more meaningful.
I rated it 6.5 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
See embedded Electric State isms above.