Mercury Station (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) [Paperback]

Mark von von Schlegell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Semiotext(e) / Native Agents | Publication Date: March 6, 2009

It's 2150, and Eddie Ryan is a prisoner on Mercury, ruled by the qompURE MERKUR: compelling future-history sci-fi by the author of Venusia.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Von Schlegell’s Venusia (2005) is a richly imaginative, avant-garde portrayal of life on a terraformed Venus. Its successor’s venue is a prison camp on Mercury circa 2150, where Eddie Ryan is doing time for his role in a bombing perpetrated by a revolutionary, post-Earth Irish army. When civilization dramatically collapses and human supervision at the prison disappears, Eddie and fellow inmates are trapped, subject to the whims of a remotely controlled computer called the qompURE MERKUR. Fortunately, the qomp-­URE can be hoodwinked enough to give Eddie and his love interest, Koré, leeway to entertain both themselves and the possibility of escape that becomes a sudden reality when Eddie’s old boss, Count Skaw, enters Mercury orbit at the helm of a space cruiser. There’s one major hitch, though. The escape will involve a big leap backward in time. Von Schlegell’s odd mixture of Joycean wordplay and jarring plot twists may not be to everyone’s taste, but he excels at pushing speculative fiction’s creative limits as far as they will go. --Carl Hays

Review

"[Mercury Station] harks back to the heyday of such New Wave giants as J. G. Ballard, as well as such glorious eccentrics as Ursula K. Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K. Dick, while shooting off stylistic fireworks reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov. [...] von Schlegell addresses the realities of a grim future with grace, humor, and intellectual honesty." Jeff Vandermeer Bookforum

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Semiotext(e) (March 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584350717
• ISBN-13: 978-1584350712
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,847,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At the Edge of Time, June 9, 2009

By 

Quincy Howe (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mercury Station (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)

Mercury Station, by Mark von Schlegell is a memorable and well crafted way station on the journey to the future of science fiction writing. The narrative travels through time and space with volatile and elegant ease. The events, dialogue, descriptions are told through a fanciful and finely wrought prism based on the legacy of J. W. Dunne, an English aeronautical engineer and futuristic thinker. In 1927 Dunne published an essay entitled An Experiment with Time where he posits that time, like a book, exists simultaneously both in its start-finish entirety and in its line-by-line continuity. Thus human knowledge is not confined just to the moment, but can encompass the entire continuum. Just as we can open a book to the beginning, to the end, or to page 253, we can view past, present, future. This is a notion that intrigued such notables as J. B. Priestly and T. S. Eliot, and it pervades the free-floating action of Mercury Station.
The difficulty for a reader who is not familiar with this kind of spatio-temporal fluidity can be a recurrent sense of disjuncture. With a writer as elegant and purposeful as Mark von Schlegell, however, I can only believe that part of his purpose is to disorient the reader. Consider the following passage describing a character at a moment of illumination.
"The voice spoke out in her head. Quite as if there was another sort of sense, a kind of extra hearing that opened up some entirely different perspective on what was occurring in the current field and she was remembering something occurring elsewhere."
Here is a vivid and immediately comprehensible account of the cognitive leap that J. W. Dunne was trying to convey in abstract and theoretical language. A major aspect of von Schlegell's craft is the ease with which he brings abstruse thought to vivid life.
A second major aspect of von Schlegell's craft is the lyrical and learned language with which he builds his descriptive passages. One of the time excursions is to the European middle ages on the planet Earth. Consider the following:
"She stood inside a crystal stage, upon which great mysteries folded out upon rich ever-changing tableaux. Containing an aether, she perceived.
Barons were prating about like multicolored cocks among trains of servile and self-serving chickens. The doggerel of torrid and peculiarly detailed lays told of their wives tupping with squires, of their daughters entertaining old friars while the good father was a'field. Wives boiled skinned weasels in their pots to gain the love of their sons."
The long and short of it: Mercury Station is an erudite and daring venture into an arena of language and thought that lies at the outer edge of our present expectations of science fiction and Mark von Schlegell has the vision and virtuosity to bring us to that edge.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars <M: Why?>, May 4, 2009

By 

telegram_sam (brooklyn, ny) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mercury Station (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) (Paperback)

This sluggish love letter from the author to his cleverness is a bad disappointment after the truly alien and creepy idea a minute thrill of the sadly under-read, under-reviewed Venusia. Where Venusia was quick and unpredictable, Mercury Station is sodden and unpredictable, bogged down by over- and poorly-written subplots, which if necessary in the book's architecture suggest a building I wouldn't even want to have my teeth cleaned in let alone live in. I would put down the book in anger for days at a time when I realized I was faced with another 10 pages of "this vile creature" running around wondering if she should touch her arm. I'd say you have to read it to know what I mean, but I wouldn't wish that on you. One can't help but wonder if the author was trying to find someplace to put some sf/fantasy stuff he wrote in his late teens and was too attached to to get rid of.

I read somewhere that the author had a breakthrough one day and "unified his writing in the direction of science-fiction" or some such thing. Here, you get the sense our author is trying to make good on that: countless literary references, historical references, and some cultural criticism, none of which is particularly interesting, illuminating, or new infest our already over-burdened text.

Venusia was great because Earth was so far away, even if it wasn't. Here, our author keeps it close because without it, he'd have nothing to reflect what he imagines to be his cleverness off of.

If you're about to make a choice, please choose Venusia and recommend it to anyone you know who reads. Then tell them to skip this book and hope his third one is better.