“A Field Guide to Surreal Botany,” expertly edited by Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui, is a charming exploration of fantastical flora through an extensive collaborative collage. This delightful tome, a compilation of imagined plant specimens with striking illustrations, serves as a contemplative counterpart to strict surrealism, embracing the unreal within literature. Applying surrealism’s tenets might be limiting, as the book aligns more with the spontaneous, chaotically liberated expression of thought, akin to the fantastical.
Featuring 48 entries, each describing a distinct surreal plant, the book’s format resembles collaborative projects like “The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.” Reading entries sequentially may seem redundant, but the project’s significance emerges when viewed as a whole, creating a new world through detailed descriptions and clever origin stories that infiltrate and reimagine our reality.
Certain entries provide glimpses into imagined realms, embellishing plants with unique attributes or defying conventional notions. The book explores themes of corporeal experience, digital existence, and the interaction of flora with intellect, showcasing diverse offerings that challenge norms.
Noteworthy entries include the Twilight Luon-Sibir, undergoing corporealis, the Esemtep commenting on the writing craft, and the Wild Homilywort as a sage professor. The Time Cactus captivates with its power to simulate time travel.
The book’s introduction distances surreal botany from serious scientific consideration, underscoring its connection to speculative fiction. Contributors challenge norms, defending fantasy against a realism-fixated literary mainstream. Addressing the need for truth in narratives, the book arranges plant specimens by continent, adding plausibility. An inviting blank page encourages reader collaboration, reflecting the broader pursuit of fantasy fiction and raising questions about our understanding of existence and knowledge limits.