My own perception of
Automated Alice differed greatly from
lemuru's. I was very pleased to discover that
Noon had not written a tired adaptation, or an obvious pastiche. He blended his own wit and his own ideas with the
imagery and
intention of
Carroll. The result was a book that was both new and classic.
Notably, he shows an awareness that the original
Alice was
not just nonsense. It was a
parody, almost a
debasing of
painfully proper Victorian children's
literature, with its incomprehensible
morality tales and its unhelpful and
demented adults. Noon achieves the same with his
mad scientists and his
beanary notation. Also lots of
encrypted psychosexual juiciness that were distinctly not present in the original.
(both the factual evidence against it and Noon's evident admiration for Carroll suggest that this was not meant as a veiled reference to the
apocryphal tales of Caroll as a
pedophile)
As for the relation to
Vurt, my belief is that
this is Alice as it would have been written in the Vurt universe. The appearence of
Celia Hobart makes this a little problematic, but if you're having trouble with
slippage between story-levels, then you haven't
really read Vurt.