Venera Dreams
A Weird Entertainment
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state, inspired in part by Venice, The Arabian Nights, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. It is divided in three sections. The first, The Lure of Vermilion, describes the impact of Venera's lure on various characters. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, ranges from the Roman Empire's invasion of Venera and an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance to a tale of Salvador Dalí's ties to Venera and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade's relationship to Venera. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve the mysteries of Venera.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The city of Venera, if it exists, is a Mediterranean island that exports the psychedelic drug vermilion and is ruled by a repressive Earth-worshipping church. Or it's ruled by fish-goddess-cultist near-mermaids. Or it's an alternate dimension accessible through a Montreal bookshop. Or it's simply an aspect of Venice. Lalumi re (The Door to Lost Pages) has created a lushly gorgeous mosaic that falls somewhere between collection and novel; the through-line is the city itself, but a city in many different, refracting, sometimes contradictory versions. The individual stories don't begin or end where one might expect. A few in-jokes aimed at science fiction fans fortunately don't break the spell, though they don't particularly land as either satire or humor, and the overall pattern turns out to be both shockingly clever and startlingly gorgeous.
