Venera Dreams

"Venera Dreams is a mosaic novel, a surreal history of a fictional and fantastical European city-state off the shore of Italy, 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, is a quartet of contemporary episodes describing the impact of Venera's lure on various characters: a love-sick teenage boy, an aimless young woman, lovers on a romantic vacation, and an arrogant writer. The second section, Adventures in Times Past, consists of six episodes ranging from the Roman Empire's invasion of Venera in Classical times, an intrigue involving a Veneran spy at the court of the Chinese Zhengde Emperor during the Renaissance, a Victorian pulp adventure revealing the secrets of Venera's espionage network, a tale of Salvador Dalí's ties to Venera, the bibliography of an author whose works describe the postwar history of Venera, and a metafictional exploration of Scheherazade's relationship to Venera from prehistory to modern times. The final section, The Secret Histories of Magus Amore, returns to the present to resolve, in four final episodes, the mysteries of Venera."--