A retelling of "Alice in Wonderland" by the author of "Vurt" and "Pollen". While searching for her aunt's lost parrot, Alice steps into a grandfather clock and finds herself transported from 1860 to 1998. The author won the Arthur C. Clark Award in 1994 and the John Campbell Award.
Automated Alice
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From the Publisher
reviews
'Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid' Arena
'Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid' Arena
'Destined for cult status…Cyberpunk at the cutting edge' Maxim
'Captures Carroll's style effortlessly…A weird Alice with a contemporary edge' Mail on Sunday
'A wild psychedelic vision…' Manchester Evening News --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
In the last years of his life, Lewis Carroll wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published and has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future. That's not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs, who sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in Manchester at the end of the Twentieth century. Oh dear, that's not at all right. Zenith O'Clock is a character invented by Jeff Noon, who really wrote this trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too…a series of skewed misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Jane Aland
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
`Automated Alice' is simultaneously a `trequel' [sic] to Lewis Carroll's two `Alice' books and Jeff Noons earlier `Vurt' novels, following the adventures of Alice as she climbs through a clock's workings and gets transported into fantastic adventures in modern day Manchester. Taken purely as an adult sequel to `Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and `Through The Looking-Glass' this is a fantastic achievement, with Noon brilliantly aping Lewis Carroll's style and sharing a love of puns, wordplay and nonsense with Harry Trumbore's internal illustrations matching the style of Tenniel's original pictures. Noon has great fun introducing Alice to such modern day concepts as computers and quantum mechanics while skewing things in typically nonsensical fashion (so civil servants become Civil Serpents while the Cheshire Cat is transformed into a chameleonic Quark) while the device of Alice hunting down missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle drives the story in much the same way as the chess game drives `Through the Looking-Glass'.
When read as a sequel to Noon's earlier shared-world novels `Vurt' and `Pollen' however the book takes on an additional resonance, with Alice's earlier appearance in `Pollen' given additional background while the plotline takes in the `disease' responsible for the merging of humans and animals in the Noon's future world, with plenty of sly winks towards the feather-accessed Vurt.
Read either way this is a fantastic novel, filled with bizarre imagery, wordplay and metafiction, but to really get the most from it you should read both Noon and Carroll's earlier works first.
When read as a sequel to Noon's earlier shared-world novels `Vurt' and `Pollen' however the book takes on an additional resonance, with Alice's earlier appearance in `Pollen' given additional background while the plotline takes in the `disease' responsible for the merging of humans and animals in the Noon's future world, with plenty of sly winks towards the feather-accessed Vurt.
Read either way this is a fantastic novel, filled with bizarre imagery, wordplay and metafiction, but to really get the most from it you should read both Noon and Carroll's earlier works first.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Automated Alice is a fantastical journey into the issues theatening contemporary society; genetic modification, virtual reality, artifitial inteligence and the abuse of power to name but a few. Wonderland thust into the future at a dizzying pace, keeps you reading with humour, suspense and hyperreal resonance. The continuity of theme within the book mirrors the original adventures to produce a highly intelegent novel to complete with the philosophical complexity of works like 'Matrix' and Boudrillard's 'Simulations'. This book is a must to any one wishing to educate themselves in the problems facing humanity from technoscientific development. Using Lewis Carrol's style, with a demanding injection of his own poetic prose, Jeff Noon leads you through the adventure, as if floatig like a character in the book, thus allowing your mind to ebb and flow with the devilishly intricate issues delt with.
This is a triumph for Noon which makes me want search out more of his work.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
J. Noon has once again managed to produce one of the most imaginative ( and bizarre!) sf novels of the year. Essentially a sequal to the original two Alice novels, Automated Alice is written in a style reminiscent of Lewis Carol - the issues are, however, those typically dealt with by Jeff Noon : the idea of identity, individuality and ofcourse humanity. Well worth a read.
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3.3 out of 5 stars
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Noon's Alice
Jeff Noon's future-set reworking of Alice starts off well, quick, inventive, unusual. It seems like a good companion to Carrol's Alice. Read more
Published on 21 July 2009 by B G Charman
2.0 out of 5 stars
Does Not Quite Work
I haven't read any of this author's other works, and only read this because of my passion for anything Carrollian. Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2009 by Red King Dreaming
4.0 out of 5 stars
Alice Again
It's sounds bizarre... and it is. Alice Liddle of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass is back. Read more
Published on 24 July 2008 by E. R. Dewsnap
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you don't expect it, it becomes an unepxected plesure
This is a great book, I think it fairer to say the use of language is in the style of "alice" books rather than the plot, characters etc. Read more
Published on 6 Jun 2004 by Mad Saint Uden
1.0 out of 5 stars
Seriously bland, no story, literary boredom...
This book is about 200 pages, with black and white illustrations. The story is very boring, Alice in a future where most animals are humanoids. Read more
Published on 5 Jun 2002 by Mr J D LEE
1.0 out of 5 stars
"Alice" fans - don't bother.
I feel enormously cheated by this book. It promises an adventure in the style of Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books, but Noon's Alice is superficial and unsympathetic; her... Read more
Published on 6 Nov 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars
really twisted
imagine a book where the lead charister is none other than alice fom alice in wonderland, then imagine that alice has a TWIN SISTER WITH TERMITS FOR BRAINS. Read more
Published on 26 May 2001 by redfernvampyre@btinterbet.com
4.0 out of 5 stars
Noon for the masses...
I love Noon's stuff, it's as simple as that, but then his novels work in a similar way to my brain. As a great fan of his work, I've tried to pass on his books to many of my... Read more
Published on 8 Jan 2001 by "ladyditax"
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superb!
(to properly describe this novel I will have to use 'surreal' twice in the first sentence) it for This surreal, oh so very surreal novel from that crazy nutter that brought us the... Read more
Published on 1 Oct 2000 by B. C. Elsley
4.0 out of 5 stars
The missing sequal to Alice through the looking glass?
Jeff Noon is a very diverse writer and this book is very different to his others. His use of language takes you back to another era while the individual words make you pause and... Read more
Published on 7 April 1999
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