The third novel in von Schlegell's System Series, set among the water-rich moons of planet Uranus, during Earth's full collapse. Was there some sort of accident? The Doll was now certain that the Japanese didn't consider him a human. He was concerned with Deary alone. Her flukes lifted to maintain her treading water, left her pale bottom and sex exposed. Was he watching simultaneously from below? The Doll let his tendrils obscure. 5 hours till orbital synch, he remembered. The Doll called up the red-screen into his mindspace and traced the instantly visible tags: Mab's Buoy relay SFS Good Fortune, Wawagawanet 2145270401:33 -from Sundogz Beginning with Venusia (2005) and continuing with Mercury Station (2009), Mark von Schlegell's System Series has moved backward in time, investigating the contours of time, memory, perception, and control in the inter-planetary system that emerge off-world in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries during Earth's full collapse. In the latest installment, Sundogz, set among the water-rich moons of planet Uranus, extremist astro-marine "spacers" have constructed an aquatic world of extraordinary scope and ambition, entirely invisible to the System at large. The Good Fortune, a spaceship en route to Moon Miranda, the most beautiful and troublesome of Uranus's satellites, sends out a party to explore rumors of a secret fish farm in the ? ring. Now the "Oan Bubble" must attempt to survive its discovery. The characters in Sundogz traverse a cybernetic world containing traces of nineteenth-century realism, Shakespearean-style wit and violence, and classic fantasy, while exploring possible modes of the imagination's survival in centuries to come. As Jeff Vandermeer noted in Bookforum, von Schlegell's work "addresses the realities of a grim future with grace, humor and intellectual honesty-[his novels] hark back to the heyday of such giants as J. G. Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K. Dick."

A novel about life under enlightened totalitarianism in the twenty-third century and the efforts of a mild-mannered junk dealer to change the human condition. Primitive literacy is redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct, creative access to the real. It's the end of the twenty-third century. Earth has violently self-destructed. Venusia, an experimental off-world colony, survives under the enlightened totalitarianism of the Princeps Crittendon regime. Using industrialized narcotics, holographic entertainment, and memory control, Crittendon has turned Venusia into a self-sustaining system of relative historical inertia. But when mild-mannered junk dealer Rogers Collectibles finds a book about early Venusian history, the colony-once fully immersed in the present-begins losing its grip on the real. With his Reality-V girlfriend Martha Dobbs, neuroscop operator Sylvia Yang, his midget friend Niftus Norrington, and a sentient plant, Rogers wages a war to alter the shape of spacetime, and in the process, revisions the whole human (and vegetable) condition.

The American artist Rita McBride (born 1960) has built an international reputation for producing sculptures that initially appear to be abstract geometric forms, but which on closer inspection prove to be derived from everyday objects and structures such as cars, towers and architectural items. McBride is concerned not only with sculptural objects, but with the situations and setting that arise from them, through performances, texts and their civic utility. Public sculpture lies at the heart of her practice, and this volume--the first major survey of McBride's career--addresses a body of work spanning almost 20 years, collecting insightful commentary and over 300 photographs of her monumental sculptures and installations.