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.

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