You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today, my guest is Jeff Noon,

the author most recently of pollen, published by Crown Publishers,

the author as well of the previous book, Verte,

soon available in paperback,

published in hardcover by Crown as well. I wanted to begin by

asking, this doesn't seem to me, and it certainly wouldn't be on bookworm if it did,

the usual kind of science fiction fair. It seems to me to be more informed by you know poetry by video

by all sorts of things where does it come from well it comes from inside my head which is a very

strange place it must be said um i think that when i came to write vert i was waiting i've been waiting to write it for a long time. I didn't realize, of course. I was actually asked to write a book by a friend of mine who had just started his own publishers. So it's quite a strange thing to do. And I've been writing plays for a long time. I'd been in bands. I'd been painting ever since I was a kid. So I was doing lots of different things.

And when I came to write Vert, it just seemed like everything that I'd been doing before suddenly

had arrived in the correct place at the correct time. And Vert just kind of wrote itself,

and I made it up as I went along. So, yeah, it's not science fiction. It's a kind of betrayal of what's inside my head

at any particular moment of writing.

Does it get...

There are certain books, it seems to me,

that because of their highly imaginative natures

...