Bookslut: "Compellingly written, with brilliant details, any Science Fiction appreciator would fall in love with this book."
Honeyed Words. Some real life Venusian inspired recipes...
SFBC: "It's like the most legible two week acid trip that you'll ever take."
MAXIM gives Venusia 4.5 out 5 stars. "A psychedelic sampling of high and low literature that marks the best of the genre...."
BOOKLIST: "A sentient, interdimensional plant is also in the whimsical cast of this absurdist blending of fantasy and cutting-edge sf that never fails to entertain and proclaims von Schlegell to be a promising new voice in the genre(s)."
EMERALD CITY: " a mind-bending excursion through the plastic neuroscapes of quantum reality."
SF CROWSNEST: "a breathtaking pulse of radicalism in a field that is all too often overly conservative."
LIBRARY JOURNAL: "von Schlegell's first novel (launching its own "System" series) provides a heady, kaleidoscopic trip into a dystopic future as well as a backward look at the necessities of the past. For most libraries."
infodad.com: 4 stars: "...the parallels between Venusia's history (or non-history) and our own remain clear and pertinent no matter how outrageous the narrative becomes. And it becomes pretty outrageous -- Venusia is a roller-coaster of a ride."
"This manifesto of the post-literate state appears in Mark von Schlegell's new sci-fi thriller Venusia. Venus, of course, is Los Angeles. With its inhospitable landscape refashioned via technology into a paradise, and illusion of limitless growth, this has always been so. In the mid 60s, the "Venus" depicted in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly was a dystopian colony of volunteer immigrants who fled planet earth in search of good jobs and suburban tract housing. Half a century later, von Schlegell's Venusia exists by default. Earth no longer exists. Phenomenology--the branch of philosophy used to legitimize so much of LA's blank neo-conceptualist academy art--has become the new rule of law..."
