Manchester is gripped by a new lottery game - "Domino Bones". Every Friday night, Manchester stills as the bones tumble into the winning combination. But there is only one real winner - the company that is taking over the city's dreams. Only a band of students can save the city from takeover.
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Amazon Review
Imagine living in a city where the lottery has become the most important thing in everyone's life. Imagine that the lottery is based on dominoes, which only form their winning or losing combination as the Friday night draw is made. Imagine that people will kill to obtain winning dominoes. Imagine adverts exhorting you to play the lottery as they fly around in the air. Now set all that in Manchester in 1999.
Nymphomation presents an alternate reality in which Manchester has become a test bed for the new game and its sinister undertones. The story is driven by characters recognisable as real people--students, street dwellers, musicians, waiters. They get caught up in what becomes for some of them a fight to the death to defeat the controlling power of the lottery and its head, Mr Million.
Noon writes with an accomplished mix of wit and darkness, and manages to invent a whole dictionary of new words along the way. Whoompy burgers sponsor the police and control the Net, blurbflies carry the adverts around the streets and the nymphomania itself tries to control but has to be controlled. The upshot is an imaginative and disturbing horror/cyberpunk/science fiction mix with plenty of harsh reality and social comment thrown in. --Sandra Vogel
From the Back Cover
The air of Manchester is alive with blurbvurts, automated advertisements chanting their slogans. But the loudest of all is for Domino Bones, the new lottery game. Every Friday night the winning numbers are illuminated on the body of Lady Luck, the voluptuous figurehead of the game. For the winner, it is unimaginable riches, for the losers another week to wait for the bones to fall again. But there is only one real winner, The Company, which plays the city's fragile expectations with callous ease.
A group of mathematics students are looking at the mind-numbing probabilities involved and searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. But what they find are more sinister realities: The Company has developed the nymphomation, and has the power to devour the city's dreams... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Nymphomation is not (in my opinion) the best of Noon's books. That honour is reserved for Vurt, a book for which five stars can never be enough. If you want to make complete sense of Nymphomation, you should really read Vurt, Pollen and Automated Alice first (and if you do the poignant surprise at the end of the book will blow you away). Then again, you can read this one on it's own and it wil still make a brilliant entertaining read. This world just isn't big enough to encompass the contents of Jeff Noon's mind, but thankfully he has created one that is. I guarantee you'll fall in love with at least one character and pine for them, and you'll find yourself wishing you were one of the others. Read it, then read it again and again and again.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Breakfast
Format:Paperback
Jeff Noon is not a cyberpunk author. People often expect his fiction to be something close to Stephenson or Gibson, but his brand of science fiction is about dreams and music, rather than algorithms and implants. Like the other books of his I have read this is a sharp, darkly allegorical story taking sex and mathematics, the ultimate lottery and the socially excluded and throwing them together into a maze with endlessly shifting walls. It connects with his other work set in the world of the Vurt, filling in a few more spaces in the mystery of how that world works, and how it got that way. I would recommend reading Vurt and Pollen first, but this book is more than strong enough to stand alone.
Don't read this book if you want hard, gadget-heavy sci-fi, read it if you want something innovative and different from anything by any other writer you should give this serious thought.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Jane Aland
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
Jeff Noon's 4th novel `Nymphomation' is also the authors 4th (and at the time of writing final) book in the series he began with `Vurt'. As such readers unfamiliar with Noon's previous work will find this a mindbending but perhaps slightly frustrating tale of a Manchester based domino lottery, and the insane mathematical ideas behind it that lead to a transformed country. As ever with Noon's work the book is filled with mind-bending SF concepts (Black Maths, Burgercops, Blurbflies) and delicious use of language, though I suspect readers of Noon's previous works will find this much more satisfying, as the book goes into detail about how the world of Vurt was first created, and also nails down the exact relationship of Automated Alice to the Vurt series. As such I would recommend the novice either read Noon's brilliant Vurt series in publication order (`Vurt', `Pollen', `Automated Alice', `Nymphomation') or chronological story order (`Automated Alice', `Nymphomation', `Vurt', `Pollen') but, fantastic as this is, it's probably not the best place for anybody to start.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astounding
Jeff Noon is an author who should be widely available cannot recomend this enough. If you like thought/ideas provoking books written in a very original way this is a must
Published 13 months ago by P. GILL
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but is Noon losing it a little?
See, here's the problem I have with Jeff Noon. Vurt and Falling Out of Cars are two of the best science fiction novels I've ever read. Read more
Published on 23 May 2008 by Mr. A. D. H. Lowe
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nympossible to understand
This is the first Jeff Noon book that I have read and it will probably be my last. I am a fan of Sci Fi and am not afraid of a different style of writing. Read more
Published on 24 Oct 2006 by Sam
5.0 out of 5 stars
More Noon for me!
Written with a unique poetic verve that transports the reader to Noon's invented world, I found the story absolutely compelling, the characters engaging, and the language... Read more
Published on 26 Sep 2006 by Green Pixie
4.0 out of 5 stars
First time Reader of Noon. Fantastic
I was on holiday with friends and one of the them had left Nymphomation on the table. I was intrigued by the cover and read the sysnopsis on the book. Read more
Published on 28 Jun 2004 by "graemec2"
5.0 out of 5 stars
Front to Back
So, what's with Noon. For those of you in the dark (as I was not that long ago) Jeff Noon wrote "Vurt", a truely cyberpunk fantasy set in Manchester. Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2004 by "mbutcher23"
5.0 out of 5 stars
Style and Rythm are everything! noon is wonderfull.
If you can't handle books which are written in an alternative style, then don't even bother to pick this book up. Read more
Published on 28 Aug 2001
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning
A brilliant ride through the pre-Vurt world. Jeff Noon continues to regress through time, going back to the origins of items and themes seen commonplace in his previous novels,... Read more
Published on 15 Feb 2001
1.0 out of 5 stars
*sigh* Has anyone got a new view on How The Future Will Be?
Imagine "Hackers" meets "A Clockwork Orange", fourth-rate computer based sci-fi meets sub-sixth-form vision of how the future will be. Read more
Published on 22 Jan 2001
3.0 out of 5 stars
RHYTHM AND STEALTH. REAL AND CRAZY.
It's taken me rather a long time to finish reading this book, and I'm sure I've not done it justice. Read more
Published on 21 Jan 2001
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