Honeyed Words: Venusia by Mark von Schlegell

Venusia by Mark von Schlegell · 23 April 2007

The beginning of Venuisa is compelling. It’s got the kind of world building excitement that draws you into a foreign place and compels you to care about it.

Though previously thought uninhabitable, Venus was found to be colonizable after a spaceman was stranded by his mission and floated by on an asteroid that he had managed to terraform. Though habitable, the rotation of Venus is such that the daylight and dark periods are 243 Earth days apiece. The founders of the colony attempted to bring a normalcy of cycles during the light period by using robots to blow holes in the ever present cloud cover and letting the Venusians experience light, but nothing can relieve the unnatural feeling of almost a year of darkness.

The colony has fallen into a state of ennui with no future and no past. The citizens exist in a drugged stupor, living from one government mandated Feed to the next.

Sylvia Yang, a mental-health professional on the colony of Venus wakes up one day and starts to question her canned existence. Sylvia’s professional function is to correct disturbing thoughts, to calm, to uphold the status quo. Through use of a specially designed Morituri helmet, Sylvia stares into the souls of the populace and prunes out their individuality in the name of conformity.

On the first T-morning of the book, acutely aware of her isolation from meaningful reality, Sylvia abstains from the Feed of flowers. She starts having original thoughts and begins to experience emotion. Even as Sylvia rebels, she performs her functions as care keeper of the Venusian colony's structured society.

Roger Collectibles, an antiquarian and patient of Sylvia’s has elected to go off Feed, in an attempt to capture the solidity of his memories regarding a priceless book that he is engaged in selling. Rogers ends up in the Sylvia’s neuroscopy office, and through she has abstained from partaking the flowers herself, Sylvia recites the manta,

“Citizen R., the flowers, though not narcotic themselves, perform for us many of the services of narcotics. They relieve us. They allow a sensory constant in our anomalous lives around which we can begin to organize our emotions in time. Without the flowers, we simply fly to pieces. The flowers link us to one another in shared experience, they weave a shared community. When that constraint is removed from your individual life, Mr. R., when you see fit to stop taking the flowers with the rest of us, the world we share will necessarily collapse around you.”

This manifesto is a preface to the rest of the story. Rogers Collectibles of course, sees it necessary that he discontinue the use of flowers. And as predicted, the world that the rest of the Venusians (those who partake in the flowers) share does collapse around him. During his adventures, in which he attracts Martha Dobbs (an upstart young reporter), Niftus Norrington (a dwarf government operative with something to prove), and even Sylvia herself, Rogers Collectibles finds himself the individual responsible for proving that humanity has a right to exist in the large multi-universe continuum.

In my introductory post, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure whether the plot would hold up under close scrutiny (It didn’t hold up under casual scrutiny). I reread the first half of Venusia over the weekend, and it did. A word of caution though; this isn’t a book that can be read blithly. I enjoyed untangling the parts that were a bit confusing to me after my first read-through and ended with a greater appreciation of the story but someone looking for a light read will probably not find this book rewarding.

When Von Schlegell starts talking about the rules of the road, about what makes the neuroscape tick, or about the role of various threads of history to the “present,” pay attention. The characters weave through space and time, through the “real” world and the nueroscape of their own minds, often blending the two. If you can, as Von Schlegell does, continuously recreate your sense of reality as you read, then the plot unfolds a mythos of good versus evil in a world where humans are struggling to maintain their own sense of self. It’s not an easy ride, nor is it at all times a pretty one, but for those looking for a book that will challenge the way that you perceive the concept of reality, then it sure it an interesting one.

Von Schlegell doesn’t belabor many points, but he continuously mentions that reality is recreated by a third party observer witnessing the events that the participants initiate. I think this, more than anything, is the message that we can take from Venusia. It’s well recognized that those who have the power to write history have the power to change the past. In a world that is increasingly information driven, Von Schlegell presents an interesting illustration of the possibilities and dangers should these powers be taken to a literal level. From the chaos that he has envisioned, we can take heed that we don’t fall into the metaphorical equivalents in writing the history of our own present.

Human Colonization, Quantum Reality, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Terraforming, Mark von Schlegell, Venus, Venusia