Pulpfiction Books is pleased to present Mercury Station, a new science fiction novel by Mark von Schlegell.
A reading and signing by the author will be held on Saturday, March 28, from 7-9pm.
Pulpfiction Books
2422 Main Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada. V5T 3E2
604.876.4311
pulpbook@telus.net
Mark von Schlegell's science fiction can be found in underground newspapers, chapbooks and zines the world over. Venusia, his first novel, was shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Prize. His criticism is published internationally by magazines and institutions like Parkett, Flash Art, the Whitney Museum and L.A. MOCA. Realometer, a collection of literary essays, is forthcoming shortly from Merve Verlag, Berlin.
Von Schlegell is based in LA, CA and Cologne, Germany.
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.
