Semiotexte: Mark von Schlegell

Mark von Schlegell

Venusia

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 23rd Century. Earth has violently self-destructed. Venusia, an experimental off-world colony, survives under the enlightened totalitarianism of Princeps Crittendon’s 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.

Mark von Schlegell first perceived a peculiar fusion of paranormal populism and philosophical enquiry in the writings of Melville and Poe while writing his doctoral thesis on 19th century American literature. These studies led him to unify his own writing in the direction of the pulp science fiction he'd quietly consumed all his life. Since then, his sci-fi stories and essays have appeared internationally in magazines, artist ../books/bookCovers, catalogs and anthologies throughout the world. Venusia, the first volume of The System Series, is his first novel.

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“This new era, with all its obscurities and anxieties, demands new
forms of fiction, of criticism. Mark von Schlegell has done as much to invent these forms as any writer I know. These new strategies demand a master of many disciplines, a crossover activist, a polymath who can synthesize them with eloquence. Mark von Schlegell would be my candidate for the writer/critic of our emerging future.”

—Norman M. Klein, author of The Vatican to Vegas:
The History of Special Effects