Mark von Schlegell
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. In addition to science fiction, Mark von Schlegell also writes art criticism, and his work has appeared around the world in such magazines as Parkett, Flash Art, and Spex, and in art books and catalogs from institutions including the Whitney Museum, LAMOCA, and Palais Tokyo.
Sundogz
Beginning with Venusia (2005) and continuing with Mercury Station (2009), Mark von Schlegell’s System Series has moved backward in time, investigating the contours of time, memory, perception, and control in the inter-planetary system that emerge off-world in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries during Earth’s full collapse.
In the latest installment, Sundogz, set among the water-rich moons of planet Uranus, extremist astro-marine “spacers” have constructed an aquatic world of extraordinary scope and ambition, entirely invisible to the System at large. The Good Fortune, a spaceship en route to Moon Miranda, the most beautiful and troublesome of Uranus’s satellites, sends out a party to explore rumors of a secret fish farm in the λ ring. Now the “Oan Bubble” must attempt to survive its discovery.
Fannie Azul
With the traveling papers and money granted her, Fainnie moved due North against the dirty river’s motion. Her blackness had made her by now near invisible to whites. Those slaves who could read the signs never failed to help her. There were other invisibles in transit, she now saw, there always were. Those who were forced to stay would die to help along those who were not.
Mercury Station
Mark von Schlegell
Published by Semiotext(e) in 2005, Mark von Schlegell’s debut novel Venusia was hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a “breathtaking excursion” and “heady kaleidoscopic trip,” establishing him as an important practitioner of vanguard science fiction. Mercury Station, the second book in Von Schlegell’s System Series, continues the journey into a dystopian literary future.
Like Venusia, Mercury Station tells a compelling story, drawn through a labyrinth of future-history sci-fi, medieval hard fantasy, and cascading samplings of high and low culture. The book is a brilliant literary assault against the singularity of self and its imprisonment in Einsteinian spacetime.
Venusia
Mark von Schlegell
Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
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.