Mercury Station (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) Paperback – Illustrated, March 6, 2009

Mercury Station, by Mark von Schlegell is a memorable and well crafted way station on the journey to the future of science fiction writing. The narrative travels through time and space with volatile and elegant ease. The events, dialogue, descriptions are told through a fanciful and finely wrought prism based on the legacy of J. W. Dunne, an English aeronautical engineer and futuristic thinker. In 1927 Dunne published an essay entitled An Experiment with Time where he posits that time, like a book, exists simultaneously both in its start-finish entirety and in its line-by-line continuity. Thus human knowledge is not confined just to the moment, but can encompass the entire continuum. Just as we can open a book to the beginning, to the end, or to page 253, we can view past, present, future. This is a notion that intrigued such notables as J. B. Priestly and T. S. Eliot, and it pervades the free-floating action of Mercury Station. The difficulty for a reader who is not familiar with this kind of spatio-temporal fluidity can be a recurrent sense of disjuncture. With a writer as elegant and purposeful as Mark von Schlegell, however, I can only believe that part of his purpose is to disorient the reader. Consider the following passage describing a character at a moment of illumination. "The voice spoke out in her head. Quite as if there was another sort of sense, a kind of extra hearing that opened up some entirely different perspective on what was occurring in the current field and she was remembering something occurring elsewhere." Here is a vivid and immediately comprehensible account of the cognitive leap that J. W. Dunne was trying to convey in abstract and theoretical language. A major aspect of von Schlegell's craft is the ease with which he brings abstruse thought to vivid life. A second major aspect of von Schlegell's craft is the lyrical and learned language with which he builds his descriptive passages. One of the time excursions is to the European middle ages on the planet Earth. Consider the following:"She stood inside a crystal stage, upon which great mysteries folded out upon rich ever-changing tableaux. Containing an aether, she perceived. Barons were prating about like multicolored cocks among trains of servile and self-serving chickens. The doggerel of torrid and peculiarly detailed lays told of their wives tupping with squires, of their daughters entertaining old friars while the good father was a'field. Wives boiled skinned weasels in their pots to gain the love of their sons."The long and short of it: Mercury Station is an erudite and daring venture into an arena of language and thought that lies at the outer edge of our present expectations of science fiction and Mark von Schlegell has the vision and virtuosity to bring us to that edge.

This sluggish love letter from the author to his cleverness is a bad disappointment after the truly alien and creepy idea a minute thrill of the sadly under-read, under-reviewed Venusia. Where Venusia was quick and unpredictable, Mercury Station is sodden and unpredictable, bogged down by over- and poorly-written subplots, which if necessary in the book's architecture suggest a building I wouldn't even want to have my teeth cleaned in let alone live in. I would put down the book in anger for days at a time when I realized I was faced with another 10 pages of "this vile creature" running around wondering if she should touch her arm. I'd say you have to read it to know what I mean, but I wouldn't wish that on you. One can't help but wonder if the author was trying to find someplace to put some sf/fantasy stuff he wrote in his late teens and was too attached to to get rid of.I read somewhere that the author had a breakthrough one day and "unified his writing in the direction of science-fiction" or some such thing. Here, you get the sense our author is trying to make good on that: countless literary references, historical references, and some cultural criticism, none of which is particularly interesting, illuminating, or new infest our already over-burdened text.Venusia was great because Earth was so far away, even if it wasn't. Here, our author keeps it close because without it, he'd have nothing to reflect what he imagines to be his cleverness off of.If you're about to make a choice, please choose Venusia and recommend it to anyone you know who reads. Then tell them to skip this book and hope his third one is better.