Mark von Schlegell is something of an oddity. Based in Cologne, Germany, this American author began his career more as a cultural critic than a science fiction scribe; he was a longtime mainstay of the contemporary arts scene in Los Angeles, and his diversion into speculative fiction--and a psychedelic, intellectual one at that--happened sort of sideways.

This is immediately obvious in his work, which is dogged and incredibly esoteric, a wry mix of stupid fantasy and devastating insight; although they're clearly influenced by the awe and slime of pulp paperback sci-fi novels, his are the kind of books that get published by MIT and the anarchist philosophy press Semiotext(e). His first novel, Venusia, throws the "dystopian future" paradigm out with the acid-bathwater, transcending spacetime and spacereason in a feverish gallop, telling the story of the totalitarian psycho-holographic regime of a future Venus. It's confusing, it collapses in on itself, it reaches across a broad length of fictive time, and it's narrated by a plant.