Venusia: A True Story (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) - Softcover

Von Schlegell, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584350261 ISBN 13: 9781584350262

Publisher: MIT Press, 2005

Synopsis

A novel about life under enlightened totalitarianism in the twenty-third century and the efforts of a mild-mannered junk dealer to change the human condition.

Primitive literacy is redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct, creative access to the real. It's the end of the twenty-third century. Earth has violently self-destructed. Venusia, an experimental off-world colony, survives under the enlightened totalitarianism of the Princeps Crittendon regime. Using industrialized narcotics, holographic entertainment, and memory control, Crittendon has turned Venusia into a self-sustaining system of relative historical inertia. But when mild-mannered junk dealer Rogers Collectibles finds a book about early Venusian history, the colony―once fully immersed in the present―begins losing its grip on the real. With his Reality-V girlfriend Martha Dobbs, neuroscop operator Sylvia Yang, his midget friend Niftus Norrington, and a sentient plant, Rogers wages a war to alter the shape of spacetime, and in the process, revisions the whole human (and vegetable) condition.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark von Schlegell's stories and essays appear regularly in underground newspapers, zines, art books, and amateurist periodicals the world over. Venusia, his first novel, was honor-listed for the 2007 James M. Tiptree Jr. Prize in science fiction.

From Booklist:

At the end of the twenty-third century, Earth has self-destructed, and the last remnants of humanity survive in a bizarre totalitarian colony on Venus. Rogers Collectibles--his name--is a Venusian antiquities dealer whose tenuous career is kept afloat by serendipitous discoveries that include a rare book detailing Venus' settlement. The tome inexplicably goes missing while Collectibles is preoccupied hallucinating lizardlike authorities. Cajoled by roving virtual media starlet Martha Dobbs into visiting a prominent neuroscop (mind inspector), Collectibles confesses that he hallucinates because he isn't taking his government-sanctioned dose of psychoactive flowers. Unfortunately, the resulting documentary video of Collectibles' session with the neuroscop catches the eyes of diminutive government agent Nifty Norrington, who is charged with blotting the minds of any flower abstainers, and Collectibles' life begins to unravel further. A sentient, interdimensional plant is also in the whimsical cast of this absurdist blending of fantasy and cutting-edge sf that never fails to entertain and proclaims von Schlegell to be a promising new voice in the genre(s). Carl Hays
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About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1584350261
• ISBN 13: 9781584350262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248