Is this thread dying? Let me give it a shot in the foot to see if it’s still twitching! Many of my favorite authors and styles have been parodied excellently several times now, but I’ve gone through every page of this thread and it seems that no one has attempted one of the most disturbing (and possibly disturbed) sci-fi/fantasy/virtual reality writers of the 90’s, Jeff Noon.
Warning…Depravity, slash, rotten language, curiously badfic, general parodied ickiness, and spoilers for RotK. Are you frightened?
**
Automated Hobbit: Middle Vurt World** by Jeff Noon as told largely in her nightmares to Snapdragon (Unreleased in the US)
Book I: Ring to Win
Sometimes we lose precious things.
But I was looking at fuck all without Mr. Frodo. My master, swapped into Vurtspace on Spider Shit, and now I’m left holding the fucking feather.
*The Feather. *
And those drooling orcpuppy bitchrutters were hot for It. Now I guess it’s just a matter of time before they find It. I’m tweaked up something fierce and keep throwing glances over my shoulder. But mainly I stare into the black lotus pollenpaste sky. Blurbflies are everywhere: watching, recording.
Slink’s out there, too. But I can’t see him yet, and I’m sick of looking.
I keep fingering the Vurt feather nervously. It’s a lovely thing, really. A dark golden yellow with flecks of red and black…an Operator Feather of Operator Feathers, the old man said. At the time, that sounded to me like just another nightmare Shit trip for tickling the throats of wretched dreamers with a rag on for control. Well, now I know.
I was *dead on. *
Fro just tells me and his damned flightless cousins over our second breakfast Ulmo Flakes cereal “there’s going to be some travel involved to get this gold shit off our hands.” Travel, he says! He means: Morchester and back again. But what’s the use now…no Fro, no way around the street maze without a bloody clever ride, and no hope against Sauron’s Ash Riders even with a gleaming vazzed up blade and Shadowgirl’s sparkling pollen dusted starlight.
I’m not thinking clearly. Not really, or I would’ve remembered that they’ll just smoke me out faster while lapping up some maniac’s Power Vurt.
Oh I’d dreamed in colors of Rosie Pink now and again, but nothing as unnatural as this wurm-charmer here. It was like high diving when you didn’t know how to swim. But some things were more important than fear, more important than death. Mr. Frodo lived like that. Lives still.
That’s all I’ve got on my mind when I close my eyes, lean back, and feel the trigger in my mouth making me more than anything want to gag it out. I just brush it deeper and welcome the undertow. Waves of nausea turn into ripples of nightmare. I can’t move. I’m lost.
That was all very fine because there’s no where to go. Smoke…a universe full of it. All the unseen world’s a jail of blinding cold blue-grey mist. I think of being covered in wool; buried inside a Hill.
In the beginning of almost everything, you’re usually stuck looking at mostly nothing.
But wait around long enough and something’s bound to happen. The smoke clears and I’m in a garden, lying on my back staring glossy-eyed at the glittering fire of the golden sun burning itself a home inside its ocean deep sky. An eye, watching. *Always watching. *This was important, but I couldn’t remember why.
I feel heavy, like something’s pushing me down, and I’m sinking inside a chilled bosom of a bright yellow flowerbed. As if I had grown there amongst the flowers. I suppose I’ve been here forever. Flowering vines snaked their casual way around my ankles and along my arms and blooms appear collaring my throat.
Some say you can die inside a yellow feather. Others say it just keeps you inside for the rest of your life.
*
“Wake up! Wake up sleepyhead. Father will be cross if he sees you crushing my twin twister’s flowers.” *
So that’s it. I’m living in a dream. None of this is real. Of course. I’m being haunted. Only I realize that I don’t know that voice. Her voice. It’s the diaphanous sing-song of a small hobbitchild, and we’re a universe away from 'Shire.
I turn my head toward her. The vines melt into Vaz puddles and they crust up on my skin. She’s not quite pure hobbit to look at: her hair’s blonde and straight to her shoulders, and she has two startling blue eyes bright as shining jewels. She’s wearing a cotton dress of the same impossible blue topped with a crisp pinafore.
“Who…?” I struggle to stand, but my feet are slow and uncooperative.
The lass rocked on her heels proudly. “My name’s Ronale. Where did you come from? Father keeps the Gate locked.” She gestured with a white wooden mallet toward an ill-fitting miniature replica of something frighteningly familiar. My eyes shift from the Gate back to the little girl. I don’t know who to trust.
“There’s a secret entrance. But it’s no good. I’ve lost someone.” I remember I have the Feather. This is a Power Trip, right? I think my voice commands some dignity. I’m wrong, of course. “My master. I think he’s been taken here. I need to find–”
“Oh! I like hiding games. Shall we find him?” Her eyes grow wide as saucers and she drops the mallet on the lawn. She rushes up to me, wraps her gloved petite fingers around my forearm, and bounces energetically on her heels. “I know where to look! I know all the best places.”
Her touch and enthusiasm is syrup for my appetite. “If you please, Miss!” I was nearly panting with joy. The air felt thicker, the flowers were dripping honey and napping the fur on my feet.
This place is starting to get to me.
Continued (it veers sharply downhill from here…) in Book II: Ring to Play!
…Though an actual Jeff Noon version probably would have more incest, more in-references to Manchester, more eroticized plant life, more girls’ names spelled backwards, more confusing tense-changes, more perversions of Lewis Carroll, more opportunities for the character’s to exercise their oral fixations, and more curry dishes? But I felt compelled to write something…and I love the ‘temptation of Samwise Gamgee’ part of RotK. 
For some reason I thought it could be done this way.
To the fellow Stephen Fry fan: I’m sorry, I really tried to write one, but it didn’t turn out. Perhaps it would be the Fry & Laurie sketch where the gentlehobbit loses his third finger and is assigned a truck and a large dog for compensation? Or the novel Oliphaunt, where Aragorn, in a particularly rude scene, heals sick pony Bill with his…eh…no, never mind… :eek:
