Pollen

If you like challenging science fiction, then Jeff Noon is the author for you. 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. If you would like a more accessible approach to Jeff Noon’s richly imagined world, I recommend Automated Alice, a modern recasting of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.