A Field Guide to Surreal Botany edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg

I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for fake non-fiction -- Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, the "Terran Trade Authority" books, Dragons: The Modern Infestation, For Want of a Nail -- so whenever something new in that area comes along, I'm sure to jump right on it. I was a big fan of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases when that came along a few years back, and I jumped right into A Field Guide to Surreal Botany when I heard about it.

It's a slim volume, only seventy-six pages long, with botanical and ecological descriptions of forty-eight plants that, strictly speaking, don't actually exist. The Field Guide is divided first by region, into sections covering the unexpected flora of The Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia and the Pacific, and then dives into plants that are more wide-ranging, in a Worldwide (Unlimited by Region) section.

The last section is where the book comes off the rails, as much as it does: the earlier sections all have plants that are slightly unreal, and mostly ones rooted in the particulars of people and places, of societies and ecologies. The last section has the obviously supernatural plants, the ones that go everywhere and have super-powers, that sometimes read like their author's ego-trips run wild.

But, before that, come the specifically placed botanical specimens, which are all well-crafted and some of which have a real eerie power. (Particularly items such as the Teslated Salishan Evergreen and the Whistle Tree.) Some of the others are quite amusing, in a very dry way, like the Lautokan Ear-blossom Plant.

The Worldwide section does start with the funniest description in the book, that of the Big Yellow Flower of Unnecessarily Obvious Information, but also has embarrassing things like the Library Plum and the nigh-omnipotent Sembla, both of which invoke alternate universes for inadequate purposes.

Chui has also provided a watercolor illustration of every single plant in the book, which accompany the descriptions. They're precisely detailed and excellent as botanical illustrations -- not exciting, of course, and so different from the illustrations we're used to in SFF books -- and add greatly to the air of verisimilitude of the book. (As does the general design, down to the darkened and fly-specked pages.)

The contributors are mostly names I don't recognize -- which could mean that they're mainstays of the small press or that they're entirely new -- with Jay Lake as the only real above-the-title participant. (Though he's credited, the same as everyone else, via a table of all of the entries in the back.) The other people I've heard of, for various reasons, include Vera Nazarian, Livia Llewellyn, and Christopher M. Cevasco. The complete list of contents and contributors is available on the book's website.

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany does contain some entries that I would describe as clunkers, but the book is mostly consistent, and quite good. It's not a normal anthology, and I doubt any of the pieces will turn up anywhere else. So, if this idea intrigues you -- and particularly if you enjoyed the Lambshead Guide to Diseases -- you'll need to either try to track Surreal Botany down at a convention or buy it directly from the publisher. (It's not available at any of the major online booksellers, and it certainly won't be in any brick-and-mortar chain stores.)