Nymphomation - Hardcover

Noon, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385408129 ISBN 13: 9780385408127

Publisher: Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

Manchester is gripped by a new lottery game - "Domino Bones". Every Friday night, Manchester stills as the bones tumble into the winning combination. But there is only one real winner - the company that is taking over the city's dreams. Only a band of students can save the city from takeover.

About this title

Review:

Imagine living in a city where the lottery has become the most important thing in everyone's life. Imagine that the lottery is based on dominoes, which only form their winning or losing combination as the Friday night draw is made. Imagine that people will kill to obtain winning dominoes. Imagine adverts exhorting you to play the lottery as they fly around in the air. Now set all that in Manchester in 1999.

Nymphomation presents an alternate reality in which Manchester has become a test bed for the new game and its sinister undertones. The story is driven by characters recognisable as real people--students, street dwellers, musicians, waiters. They get caught up in what becomes for some of them a fight to the death to defeat the controlling power of the lottery and its head, Mr Million.

Noon writes with an accomplished mix of wit and darkness, and manages to invent a whole dictionary of new words along the way. Whoompy burgers sponsor the police and control the Net, blurbflies carry the adverts around the streets and the nymphomania itself tries to control but has to be controlled. The upshot is an imaginative and disturbing horror/cyberpunk/science fiction mix with plenty of harsh reality and social comment thrown in. --Sandra Vogel

From the Back Cover:

The air of Manchester is alive with blurbvurts, automated advertisements chanting their slogans. But the loudest of all is for Domino Bones, the new lottery game. Every Friday night the winning numbers are illuminated on the body of Lady Luck, the voluptuous figurehead of the game. For the winner, it is unimaginable riches, for the losers another week to wait for the bones to fall again. But there is only one real winner, The Company, which plays the city's fragile expectations with callous ease.

A group of mathematics students are looking at the mind-numbing probabilities involved and searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. But what they find are more sinister realities: The Company has developed the nymphomation, and has the power to devour the city's dreams...

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0385408129
• ISBN 13: 9780385408127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368