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"Chrononauts
appear in back of the targets' brains and take over the whole
body without memory of their journey, just the ability to
comprehend it according to local cultural customs. In both
the field of exit and the field of entry there must be local
customs willing to accept the phenomenon in full allegorical
complexity. Superstitions, particular observational patterns,
so- called sciences...."
Mark von Schlegell’s debut novel Venusia (Semiotexte(e),
2005) was hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a "breathtaking
excursion" and "heady kaleidoscopic trip,"
marking the arrival of an important new voice in vanguard
science fiction. Mercury Station, Book 2 in von Schlegell’s
System Series, continues the journey into a dystopian future.
It's 2150. System Space has collapsed and
most human civilization with it. Eddard Ryan and his fellow
prisoners continue to suffer the remote-control domination
of the Mercury Station Borstal and its condescending central
authority, the qompURE MERKUR— programmed to treat all
prisoners as adolescents. When self-styled chrononaut Count
Reginald Skaw shows up off Mercury with an inter-station cruiser
at his disposal, there’s suddenly the possibility of
escape -- into the past. Ryan, an Irish Republican, has always
fancied himself a skeptic where time travel is concerned.
But the girl of his dreams, Black Rose Army confederate Koré
McAllister, thinks otherwise. And when Koré mysteriously
disappears with Count Skaw, a little witch emerges out of
the textual wilderness of fourteenth century Preussland to
dispute the legitimacy of history itself.
Fusing new wave sf with hard medieval fantasy,
sparkling with allusion and vivid detail, Mercury Station
performs a daring prison-break from Einsteinian spacetime,
inhabiting new reaches of the imaginable future and the impossible
past.
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