Customer Reviews

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

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Venusia is the first book I've ever read that takes time travel to its logical conclusions, where the coming undone of the fabric of reality is not just a threat but a given from the first page. It is the most complicated narrative meditation on reality and the imagination I expect I will ever encounter. Reading it is something like walking through one of Salvador Dali's paintings after another.

It takes place in a post-literate society where daily flower feedings are mandated by law and scanner helmets allow both doctors and police to enter people's minds and alter them. Its unlikely hero is an antiquities dealer on the verge of the biggest deal of his career who finds himself falling in love with a reality-TV journalist.

This book is fully realized, completely original, deeply plotted and compulsively readable. I would recommend it to anyone who liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Forget cyber punk, nano-tech, and that tired victorian future...whatever. Venusia is hard core! A story that can't be condensed and described, you have to experience it. This is truly a messed up pyschedelic trip through speculative fiction, a post modern rollercoaster ride that never feels academic. The thrills of six flags combined with the fantasy and attention to detail of old school disneyland all in a portable, easy to carry, compressed universe called a book. Do you love PKD and Delany? Do you crave dense, mind expanding, tongue twisting, mushroom chewing meditations on the limits of the imagination? Then this is your thang. Dr. Bloodmoney meets Palmer Eldritch meets Dreams in the Witch House meets Perdido Street Station meets the Secret Life of Plants. Yeah, I said it, The Secret Life of Plants. Don't be fooled by the high falutin publisher and the text-book like cover, this is pulp at its best.

Von Schlegell provides a context for some of the deepest tryps I've ever taken. A good place to reflect on all those things that we should be asking but don't. Don't be a busy dude, let it take you on that tryp.

The book is a long sequence of disconnected gibberish. You will be irritated by made-up words like v-day and t-night (venusian-day, terran-night respectively) from the first page, and the "plot" doesn't appear until the last third of the book. Plenty of completely random action and imagery are the backdrop for two dimensional characters who save the completely malleable universe from Jorx who for no apparent reason wants to destroy it, or at least remake it in his own image. What's real? Who knows and who cares.

Post-literate indeed. It is 200 pages of dream sequence, quite likely "written" while hallucinating.