Creatures with a thousand names.

Again, very much in the postmodern tradition, parts of Vurt read like an ancient Zen scroll with its difficult to understand metaphores about reality:

Beyond all this lies the FIFTH LEVEL. Fifth level beings have a thousand names, but Robomandogshadowvurt isn't one of them. They have a thousand names because everybody calls them something different. Call them what you like —you're never going to meet one. Fifth level beings are way up the scale of knowledge and they don't like to mingle. Maybe they don't even exist.

(Jeff Noon: p. 266)

Who are these beings then? They exist in the Vurt, sure. We know that much. But do they just live there or do they also have existence on this other side of reality? Because, once we start playing with the notion of virtual reality, that's precisely one of the problems: where do we draw the line? How do we distinguish what is real from what is not anymore? In the end, reality cannot be named. Or, to put it a different way, all its entities have a myriad of names (i.e., many different identities that coexist in one "being"). All this connects more with old Zen and Taoist concepts than with our own Western philosophical tradition, bent on building castles in the air since its very beginnings (long-lasting ideas that belong in the realm of metaphysics, where things supposedly remain as they truly are, unchanged and perfect. In other words, a chimera.

The real meaning of virtual reality: it has no meaning

Interesting conversation between Tristan and Scribb over the meaning of it all:

"Don't get involved, Scribb. Some crazy religion, that's all. They think Vurt's more than it is, you know? Like it's some higher way or something. It's not. Vurt is just collective dreamings. That's all. Christ! Isn't that enough for them?"

(Jeff Noon: p. 220)

No, there is nothing special behind it. No hidden reality. No deep knowledge. No supernatural experience. It's all made up. It's a collective dream. A collective work of art that we all create at the same time. And yet, isn't that fascinating enough? Doesn't that prove our power to create new realities, new worlds without a need to go further beyond what is there? What need is there to invent a religion to explain it all?

It's all very postmodern, actually. In that sense, Vurt is a clear member of the cyberpunk tradition invented by William Gibson and others.

Feathers?

I find it quite strange that Jeff Noon resorted to such a low-tech mechanism as feathers to allow the access to a virtual world. It just feels weird. It's difficult to visualize that in a future where humans can immerse themselves in an alternate reality, the tool used to do is just color-coded feathers (?!). Wouldn't it make more sense to "jack into" the virtual world, literally, by using a plug inserted into our bodies? Heck, if one chooses to go the low-tech route, even pills would have been a better choice, I think.

An early description of cyberspace.

William Gibson is well known for coining the terms cyberspace and matrix to describe a virtual reality accessed via computers or some form of technology. The same idea is very nicely developed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash novel, among many others, but the seed of the idea is already present in the Sprawl Trilogy without a doubt:

There is no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor's lecture in the arcology's executive creche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback providing a touch-world of studs and triggers... As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied...

(Gibson: pp. 55-56)

We are still a long ways from the cyberspace described in the cyberpunk novels, but we're definitely getting there pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, with the success of Second Life, we just need a leap forward in the commercialization of already existing immersive technologies coupled with yet another little push in hardware performance. However, that holy grail of the 1980s and 1990s science-fiction seems now within reach. The global reach of the Internet is now a reality in our daily lives. People work from home, share ideas, pictures, videos, watch TV shows and movies and talk to distant relatives thanks to the Internet. All of this would have sounded like science-fiction fantasy to anyone in the first half of the 1980s.