Bookslut: "Compellingly written, with brilliant details, any Science Fiction appreciator would fall in love with this book."
J. Strau, ARTFORUM: "And though the off-world-colony location might suggest the writer's desire to escape the dilemmas and pressures of literary production today, Venusia in fact possesses all the qualities of great fiction."
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..."
