Dream of Venus
by Miles Beller
C.M. Publishing
"Dream of Venus (Or Living Pictures)" by Miles Beller is a hybrid of fact and fiction, a retro-take on the futuristic aspirations of the New York World's Fair of 1939. The book serves as a verbal evocation of architecture, politics, advertising, philosophy, science, art and technology — William Gibson meets James Joyce.
Its anti-protagonist, a failed painter named Zeke Lichtenquist, is often
overpowered by the sights and sounds of the Fair, his own life overcome by
chance, incidentals, entropy and caprice. Lost in a proto-Disneyland that
houses wonders like Futurama (where "the incredible world of 1960" has
been created), Lichtenquist tries to make sense of things, and to put his life together in "a pattern" that has meaning.
But there is no plot to Zeke's existence or, in fact, to the story as a
whole. Rather, "Dream" makes its points through quantum
bursts of events and actions that assault Zeke and the reader in non-linear
fashion. In this regard, Steve Erickson, whose own highly praised and
innovative novels play with time and causality, offers the view on the book's
jacket that "Dream" is "ruthlessly trampling the limits of what today's
constricted fiction can conceive." And in terms of traditional story-telling
this is quite so.
Though "Dream of Venus" looks like nonfiction, it is an invention, though a
heavily researched one. With its largely made-up bibliography, its faux intro, and its eccentric index the novel plays with the notion of fiction and
nonfiction and how context influences our reading of text.
The novel reads as an experiment, an effort to cram too many things inside
its pages. In this regard "Dream of Venus's" construction ranges from the
narcissistic to the gigantic, from the tumescent to the hallucinatory, and
the styles so vary that its chapters could almost be described as many novels
between the covers. Here is a metaphysical potboiler — fiction that juggles
past, present, and future. Here is history presented as a disjointed process
rather than as a secure progression of facts.
The New York World's Fair is a perfect place to play with these ideas. With its aborning technology of "picture radio" (television) and Futurama ("I Have Seen the Future," lapel buttons announced), the exposition pulled people deep into a conjured Tomorrow, to a day far removed from the sorrows of its own time.
Though Beller can get a bit labored in his pop culture references and
advertising inclusions, "Dream of Venus" depicts a future past where
anticipation morphs into nostalgia and the distant dream hovers over
white Trylon and Perisphere, the co-joined buildings that symbolized the Fair's futuristic theme. This is writing that matters.
