Automated Alice
Jeff Noon
252 pages
published in 1996

I have a confession to make. I've never read Alice in Wonderland, nor have I read Through the Looking-Glass. Which is a bit of a handicap in reading this book, Automated Alice, because it's what Jeff Noon thinks a third book about Alice could've been like. Obviously, I cannot judge how well he succeeded, only judge how the book reads on its own.

The story stars one dreary afternoon in Manchester, 1861, where Alice was visiting her Great Aunt Ermintrude. When she foolisly leds her aunt's parrot Whippoorwill escape from its cage, it flies into the grandfather clock and disappears. Alice has to find the beast before her afternoon lessons at two o'clock, so climbs into the clock to get the parrot back. But when she does so, she falls into a sea of numbers, ending up in the year 1998....

Where she still has to catch that dashed Whippoorwill, amidst all the weird wonders of 1998. Not only that, she also has to go on a quest to find the missing twelve pieces of the puzzle she was making before she climbed into the grandfather clock before she can get home. And if that wasn't enough, there's also a murder mystery going on: a jigsaw murder mystery...

I'm not sure what to make of it. I liked the story well enough, but at times it was too cloying for my liking. The concept itself is interesting enough: "Alice in Futureland" so to speak, with the imagined 1998 is weird enough to have been imagined by Lewis Carroll (termite computer mounds, automobiles with legs, atrocious puns), but on the whole it left me with a feeling of "eh". An okay read, but not nearly as good as Vurt was. I think it was too self consciously striving to be wacky.