Automated Alice

By Jeff Noon

Book Overview

On a dull and rainy afternoon, in 19th-century Manchester, desperate to avoid the question of ellipses (on which her strict great-aunt Ermintrude is sure to test her this afternoon), Alice works on a jigsaw puzzle, only to find (frustratingly)??that??12 pieces are missing from the picture of the London Zoo. Lamenting aloud, Alice is answered by her great-aunt's very talkative parrot, Whippoorwill.??Prompted by Whippoorwill's increasingly intriguing riddles, Alice frees the him from his cage. Suddenly, in pursuit of the elusive bird, Alice falls into the workings of a grandfather clock and emerges in the Manchester of 1998-a world of automated wonders and inspired nonsense with a distinctly 19th-century flavor. Whippoorwill leads Alice along with a series of enigmatic riddles, and Alice soon encounters a part-man, part-badger named Captain Ramshackle, Professor of Randomology, and the logical side of her own self in the person of an automated garden statue name Celia.??While??word of Alice's arrival spreads and she becomes the prime suspect in a series of Jigsaw murders, Alice discovers, in the unlikeliest of places, in the curiousest of future worlds, one after another of her missing Jigsaw pieces.??Not until she finds all 12 will she get to the radishes of time that will allow her to elude the Civil Serpents and return to her own time.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517704900
• ISBN13: 9780517704905
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

The Trequel

Jeff Noon wrote this amazingly entertaining and imaginative book as a trequel to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice suddenly finds herself transported to 1998 Manchester and becomes the prime suspect in the Jigsaw Murders, as she tries to gather the pieces and find her way back home to her own time and reality. As she is escorted on her journey by Celia, an automated version of herself,...

This Book Is Cool!

I wasn't at all disappointed with this book...it wasn't what I thought it would be...I had been looking for it for about a year and finally got a viable means of monitary transaction on the net...so I bought it.I really enjoyed the wordplay and the illustrations...this book is a children's book...or rather a "inner-children's book"... If you like riddles and the cool writing style of Jeff Noon then you are going to like it.....

An interesting spin-off

Alice in Wonderland has "inspired" a number of hacks to produce poor material, from movies to books to video games. Here, Jeff Noon manages to avoid re-treading the surreal cliches in which most "tributes" indulge.This book is a cross-pollination of Lewis Carroll's universe (from whence Alice originates) with Jeff Noon's universe (the setting of Vurt, Pollen, etc.) Noon (who has a distinctive style of his own) does a fair...

Wit and intelligence

Jeff Noon allegorizes the arts and sciences with the use of some brilliant wordplay. The chapters alternate between laugh-out-loud set pieces and ideas that would make Neal Stephenson turn green with envy, all written in a hilarious style that puts Douglas Adams to shame.

Guess it's just me

Jeff Noon... I really hadn't read nothing about or from him untill the day my cousin gave me this book. I'm 14 years old and I'm portuguese, but I love everything about the english culture and specially reading books and magazines. When i got this book, I got myself in a challenge. It's quite a big one, and I promised myself that I would finnish it! It wasn't hard as the book is fantastic and I love Alice. The only thing...