The following posts include (1) "footnotes" for The Doris Piserchia Website (link at left), (2) texts-in-process that will eventually appear there, (3) texts from other websites, and (we hope) (4) stimulating discussion threads. The picture to the left is the back cover of The Spinner (book club edition), depicting a citizen of Eastland "hanging out" while Ekler the cop and Rune the idiot-superman look on.
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I recently read People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, a book which discusses the link between psychology and evil. The author identifies the root of human evil as narcissism and the absolute horror of others finding out one is not perfect, so one has to constantly maintain the lie and in so doing, harm those around them. The ones around them, especially
their dependents, are only so many objects to be used. It's very similar to psychopathy. The 'evil' appear to be normal and can function very well in society, but are unable to really perceive others as being important. Only their wants, their needs, matter. They are their own universe. (And it's a cold, dead one, too.)
While reading, I was reminded strongly of Vennavora from A Billion Days of Earth gasping, "My unconquerable will!" The human "gods" were all narcissists, weren't they...I hadn't really understood why Sheen was trying to "eat" them until now, or why the Earth cast them out. He/the Earth was trying to re-establish contact between them and their world.
Their massive egos, bigger than their big human rears (which DP pokes fun at), were insulating them from actual life. The adamant "I will" excludes all possibility of growth...they were just big infants, demanding without giving. All the envy that the rat-humans had for them should have evaporated right then and there.
My old point of view was: "If Earth's first children, the humans-turned-Gods, couldn't grow up and leave the nest, why is she bothering to raise kids? Kind of selfish if you ask me...and Sheen is Satan?! Wha-?" but I believe I get that segment now.
Notes on Mr. Justice.
1. What's up with the title? The title character is spelled "Mr." throughout the book. DP referred to him as "Mr." in our interview. The "Mister" is cute and quaint and probably more memorable than "Mr.," but it's wrong. Note to future editor: correct title.
2. The book depicts a "wilderness of mirrors" straight out of a Cold War spy story. Two time-traveling supermen (Justice and Bingle) are the rival superpowers. Both have "armies" operating outside the law. Both have daughters they cherish and are covertly grooming sons-in-law. SPAC, the school for gifted "freaks," appears to be run by both sides (or is so infiltrated by both that there's no distinction). It's like The Village in the Prisoner TV series. Who's really in charge?
3. In our interview I said there was no sex in the novels, relative to the short stories. Apologies to Doris. This book has a female sexual predator named Godiva who snaps one victim's neck after having sex with him, and an4lly r4pes another. Also there is a horrible scene of child r4pe. (I have to put in the 4s to keep ghouls off the page.) Daniel's relationship with the barely pubescent Pala, although chaste, would probably raise a few eyebrows with the God Squad.
4. I added a passage to the Excerpts Page: It's where Daniel looks at the seven photographers' work, trying to nail Mr. Justice through the style of photos MJ takes of his "accuseds." This is a great example of Piserchia transcending genre: using a purely subjective, poetic act of art criticism to catch a perp. Later, there's a passage where Daniel talks to a "doll" (supercomputer), trying to reason his way to Justice, that's also very poetic.
5. Throughout the book, characters keep asking, "Is he [MJ] Superman?" Many of the concerns of the story--about vigilantism, morality, power, personal obsession--surfaced ten years later in Alan Moore's brilliant comic book series Watchmen. I wonder if Moore knew this novel?
6. I assume it's Mr. Justice who puts up the red sign, flapping in the breeze between skyscrapers, announcing that he "has a daughter." But if Pala is his daughter, why announce it this late? She's almost 20! Is it because her job as a mole in Bingle's organization is done, and she's safely out of harm's way? Or is because she herself has had a daughter (with Daniel)? Wouldn't that be Justice's granddaughter? Or is the baby "his" daughter because she, not Pala, will inherit his powers?
7. Why does Pala first appear to Eric Fortney naked, stuffed into a trashcan? Does she, like Bingle's daughter Leona, have incomplete or unpredictable powers? Isn't Justice a bit callous to use his 12-year-old this way (working undercover for Fortney)?
Here's a challenge: try finding the Doris Piserchia Fan Page in Yahoo! Clubs (sorry, it's Yahoo! Groups now ) without using an existing bookmark. It's not in the index of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors. Searching "Piserchia" gets you nowhere and "Doris Piserchia" pulls up a Doris Day chat group. Looks like the only way to find it is to click though 662 groups, ten groups at a time. I gave up after 40. Thanks, Yahoo! Also, thanks for all the new pop-ups lurking behind every pillar and post! Also, thanks for the error message that came up when I tried to post this rant! Isn't it fun watching erstwhile hot properties of the dot-com era decay into ruins?
Science Fiction?
Before I get to DP's short stories I wanted to say a few things on the subject of genre. Bruce
Sterling came up with the term "slipstream" to describe
books that aren't precisely mainstream literature but
aren't science fiction either. I believe he wants his
own writing to escape the taint that sf has acquired
because of its awful marketing conventions (Buck Rogers
and “peeled eyeball” covers) and popular perception
as a domain of geeky, fan-fiction-writing amateurs.
Knowing what the field has to offer, when I hear my
literature-reading friends say "I don't read science fiction," I get
steamed. On the one hand, it's hard to defend a genre that
looks so juvenile, but on the other, you have to wonder if they've ever read Burroughs or Pynchon or Orwell. DP's novels were
all originally published within the sf field, where
they no doubt baffled many an adolescent boy, and I
sometimes fantasize about how they might be marketed the
second time around. I imagine sleek covers with muted
computer graphics and jacket copy describing DP as "a
literary dimension-hopper, blinking from one set of
genre conventions to another in relentless,
techno-pastoral-visionary narratives." Is that farfetched? Look at what she's written: a metaphysical detective story (Mister
Justice), Night of the Living Dead- style horror (The
Spinner), a proto-cyberpunk, Taylorist nightmare (I,
Zombie), books set in the future that read like ancient
mythology (Doomtime, Earthchild), and an Appalachian
vampire yarn (Blood County)!! If Jack Womack and J. G.
Ballard can be discreetly moved over to the "fiction"
section at your local bookstore, why not this writer?
Some random thoughts on Doomtime:
1. The cliff-dwelling residents of Neo are somewhat like the Eloi in HG Wells Time Machine. All the Neons' physical needs are provided for: When the "flesh pool" that recycles their corpses into fresh meat gets low, a siren goes off, and thousands of rodent-like "kikks" come running from the surrounding fields and jump into the pool, replenishing the meat supply. Instead of Morlocks, the Neons have technologically adept ancestors (us)--who somehow made machines that never run down--to thank for their comfort.
2. I read recently that California has what entomologists are describing as a "super-colony" of ants that stretches from San Francisco to San Diego. Gene samples from either end of the colony show that the ants, who migrated from elsewhere (South America?) fairly recently, are all essentially brothers and sisters. They represent a tremendous threat to indigenous species, and are killing them off right and left. The colony is held up as an example of the kind of "super-organisms" (the Kudzu vine is another) that are emerging during the current Great Extinction Period issued in by us humans.
I immediately thought of Tedron and Krake, the ubiquitous, world-controlling trees in Doomtime. I wonder if Piserchia's vision of the future, in which humanity survives by virtue of its own ancient technology while rival super-organisms dominate a drastically reduced ecosystem, may not be dead on the money. Scary.
Early vs Late Books
I’ve been thinking about DP’s short stories, and her responses to our interview questions and wanted to
jot down a few ideas. DP says she prefers the
short stories to the novels and prefers the early
novels (Star Rider, Billion Years) to the later
ones. I’m inclined to agree about the short
stories--they’re really amazing (more on them later)--but I’m not so sure the early books are necessarily the best.
For DP, quality is a matter of “balance,” and the
short stories have that in abundance. They are tightly
constructed, and deliver emotional wallops. The early novels
are close to them in intensity but also in
style--philosophical, discursive, sprinkled with mock-Socratic
dialogues. I like the later books because they "show" rather
than "tell": DP plunges you right into their worlds
and lets the setting and action make her points (I
became especially aware of this when I was looking for
quotes from Earth in Twilight--there are few
stand-alone speeches, it’s all in the flow of events). I was
fascinated to learn that the later novels were written in a
headlong rush and that DP subsequently couldn’t summon the
enthusiasm to revise them. I think that’s the source of
their power. They feel as if they were born out of some
inner necessity that drives the author to invent like
mad. I started reading DP back in the ‘80s because she
reminded me of Philip Dick during his most creative period
(early to mid 1960s): staying up all night, working on
the deadline from hell, writing novels that were, on
some level, just “one damn thing after another,” but
authentically visionary. Like Dick (minus the drugs) and H. P.
Lovecraft (minus the hypersensitive reclusiveness), DP
truly “takes you to another place,” which turns out to
be (shudder) a lot like the place we’re all living
in. (It's also a subtly feminine place, which I find
hard to talk about without overgeneralizing--please
help me out here!) I suppose DP could have tightened
up Doomtime or Earthchild to make them less a
series of episodes, but I’m glad she didn’t; Doomtime,
for instance, might have lost that dreamlike quality
of morphing from sf scenario to druidical fantasy to
Edith Hamilton mythology to pungent social satire (not
necessarily in that order). And other late books don’t need
any tweaking at all: The Spinner and Blood County
strike me as very well organized. More on the short
stories in a later post.
It's hard to top the premise of I, Zombie: You're having your face burned off every day by molten metal, you eat slop, your co-workers are ventriloquists' dummies, someone on the job is trying to kill you, your factory is slowly filling up with water, and--oh, yeah--you're dead! A better account of the American world of work is not to be had.
[This] is Piserchia's first novel, and her strangest. The early twenty-first century is a time of social breakdown, and the breakdown is being fought (or abetted--it's not clear) by an uncatchable vigilante who calls himself Mr. Justice. Sometimes he leaves criminals bound and gagged at police stations, with proofs of their crimes. (The proofs are typically in the form of photographs of the crimes being committed, although there were no witnesses.) Sometimes he exacts his own retribution. Finally, the Secret Service opts for a long-term solution to the problem: They recruit a twelve-year-old boy with exceptional potential, put him in a school which can enable him to realize that potential, and aim him at Mr. Justice. Years pass, during which Daniel Jordan grows up and starts his hunt, and during which society continues to break down. It's an early work, raw and imaginative, and the one portraying the most squalid of Piserchia's worlds. Of her better novels, it's also the one readers are most likely to dislike.
--Dani Zweig, from Belated Reviews
[This] is my personal favorite [Piserchia novel]. There are invisible rings floating through the air, and people who can see them--a recent mutation--can step through them to other worlds in other dimensions. (If the world is too far from Earth-normal, they are transformed into creatures adapted to that world.) Despite the possibilities of these worlds, things are fairly grim on Earth--social breakdown, resource depletion, a mysterious rise in the incidence of earthquakes--though most of the problems remain in the background.
In the foreground, we have Daryl, whose abilities--exceptional control of the rings and exceptional physical adaptations--extend well beyond those of the standard mutation. She also has amnesia. In the course of one of her unauthorized vacations from the school where she is being kept, she is kidnapped and sold to a team of agents whose investigation turns out to be related to the earthquakes. The problem of the earthquakes begins to converge with that of her lost past--and neither seems to make much sense. As I said, I had fun with this book. It's unrealistic, even on its own terms--the enemies Daryl faces are Keystone-Kop-level inept--but the character of the protagonist and the style of the narration make the book enjoyable.
--Dani Zweig, from Belated Reviews
Earth In Twilight is the prototypical Doris Piserchia book. It has that weird woman-trying-to-sound-like-a-guy style that went with the turf of writing in the Bad old days of the Boys Club, along with a love of scene that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the narrative. It is a reverse Garden of Eden story, in the fabulous Jungle that Earth has become in the evening of its existence. The humans are gone to the stars, and the weird polyglot fauna that has evolved from the cast off remains of questionable genetic tinkering rule a dense green thicket where once walked Man. It is a bit like the Gene Wolfe Torturer world without the people, or Vance's Dying Earth without the magic. It is distantly reminiscent of Neal Barrett's Aldair world, a more primitive genetic funhouse where the weirdly evolved organisms live without the Myths of humankind. Earth has become a greenery-choked planet inhabited by Strange Creatures who are the accidental Frankensteins of Old Earth's biological tinkering. Earth-descended humans who have been raiding its genome have decided to defoliate the wreckage and make the planet once again a habitable and useful place, and have dispatched a small team to lay the groundwork for a massive chemical weed whacking. The survivor discovers Civilization happening among the strange fruit of a world buried under miles of vines and vegetation, and the race is on to avert a planetary Apocalypse.
The narrative moves interestingly between the points of view of the Spacer and the various indigenous organisms he encounters. Monsters reveal their beauty and whimsy, and the children of earth show the Outsider that his views of habitability and society are narrow and in need of renovation. If there is a major weakness of Earth In Twilight, it is a lack of seriousness in the narrative that might have allowed Piserchia to study more deeply some of the profundities her Twilight world opens up. The forced breeziness of the writing is just a bit too wacky at times, considering the genocidal fate that awaits. Where the book shines is in its evocation of a world transformed, and in its delineation of the lives, both inner and outer, of its strange creatures. Piserchia is a genius of setting, with a love for the complex and baroque that sometimes edges over into too much, but more often gently draws the reader In. She doesn't feel the need to throw in the often unbelievable and sometimes stupid and excessive hard sci fi Tech that writers of her generation so often pound readers over the head with, a refreshing thing that allows the reader to focus on the story and characters. Piserchia is that rare science fiction writer who can crank out a good tale without a lot of the conventional gimmickry associated with books of this era (and, for that matter, ours).
Is it a Dying Earth story? Hard to say, but probably not, at least in the conventional sense of the term. It is an Earth at the end of History, a twilight place long abandoned by Man, but one has the feeling that the Earth is getting along just fine without us, thank you very much. It might be called an Environmental Twilight Earth story, which abandons the human-centric Dying Earth idea for something a little more inclusive of all the things which are not-Man. For, for all we know, the era of Man may just be a setup for the great Cockroach Empire that will sweep through the galaxy and humble our puny relics of Civilization. The Earth will live on, and our imaginings of its Dying are merely our fear of the inevitable fate of our species and the end of our History.
--from Strange Words
Doris Piserchia's rather amazing first book encapsulates everything right and wrong about her writing. There is the cranky, Old School prose that bodes no good, the sometimes stilted attempt at a breezy noir-ish style that doesn't always ring true. But Mister Justice rapidly becomes a living narrative that, in the end, is one of the most profound time travel stories of the last fifty years. A garden variety weird revenge story grapples with the inherent paradoxes that silly up most time travel stories, and creates a time travel without instrumentality tale every bit as interesting as the recently deceased Jerry Yulsman's Elleander Morning.
Mister Justice is a monster of a narrative, flying hither and yon through layers of themes before bringing it all Home. The corruption of modern consumer capitalism, the criminality lying beneath the surface of civil society, and the lack of justice in a hackneyed legal system form a dystopic P.O.V. that is only the setting for a complex tale of a temporal Vigilante trying to save the world. And the tale is the juice of a time travel vision of great subtlety and innovation. No clunky Time Machines, no shiny tech rationale, but an interior time voyage through the infinite worlds of a mysterious multiverse. Reviewing the plot cannot begin to do justice this interesting book, so we quote a passage that Speaks to us.
Time was a series of corridors with each moment having its own corridor.Or...
Time was the clocked motion of matter. As such, it became an abstract, not real and not there, merely a convenience created by minds.
Or...
Time was a portrait of whatever existed. Like an oil painting, time--reality, space, matter--lay sprawling everywhere, and each atom of pigment represented a minutia of thing, state, being. No change took place in the portrait for it was a still life, a great gob of paint hurled onto canvas. Change? Nonexistent, abstract. The atom that lay after the one before it had a different state of being. Reality was motionless. Everything on the painting was in a static condition. To comprehend change here, one had to have senses keen enough to perceive an atom and at the same time perceive the next atom and the next.
Perhaps time was more like a cartoon than a painting. The show was finished if the hand stopped drawing. Each slide died after its showing, or it was arrested and never moved again. A leg raised and stayed forever raised unless the next slide came to show it descending: a scattering of motion, blurred movement, nothing at all unless one happened to be the owner of the leg.
To travel in time, one had to walk across the portrait, tramp over the atoms representing yesterdays. Along the way, such a traveler would pass his selves or his replicas who had served to bring him to the present. The replicas were as real or as unreal as he. A sense of space wasn't needed if one wished to travel over the painting. What was necessary was the unusual ability to know where today was in relationship to yesterday. The normal person related tomorrow with today more easily than he did today with yesterday. What was gone must be let go of, while what was yet to come still had to be reckoned with. The time traveller first needed a piece of today in order to orient himself, then he fastened himself to the piece, and his mind moved, and now his body was in a different position in reality. The building of a hundred years ago still existed, the scream heard by someone a month before still rang, the past tide flowed without being perceived. What had gone into stillness was real to the time traveler because he knew where it was. Not when, but where.
--from Strange Words
It is supremely ironic that Doris Piserchia closed out her career the way many sci fi writers begin theirs, writing a zombie novel under a pseudonym. But what a zombie novel it is. I, Zombie (DAW, 1982), as written by Curt Selby, puts a modernist economic/political twist on the wheezing tale of the Undead among the living. A future spacefaring society has developed wetware that can be installed in the heads of the recently Dead, allowing them to be used as slave laborers in the hellholes of extraterrestrial colonization. And not just any of the Dead, but the formerly insane, the suicides, the trash that no one cares for or about. This is cast as an economic decision, as a cost saving alternative to expensive robot labor. I, Zombie is one of those books that seems to be screaming with hidden agendas, its story a thinly disguised metaphor for any of a number of societal criticisms. But this is a Piserchia book, and the reader is tempted to accept that the perceived metaphor is merely a lush setting from the author's wild imagination. This is one of the most maddening things about Piserchia's books. There are so many "almosts" in them; almost great writing, almost unique conceptualizations, almost "message" stories. It is hard to tell what exactly is going on. I, Zombie's slave laborers are mostly female, which, if it were any other book of the early 1980s, would raise an immediate red flag of feminist agenda. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Nor does the obvious political question of the institution of slavery, or the class issues of using the shells of the cast off and unprotected as human construction equipment. Piserchia seems to have used a thoroughly loaded concept in an unloaded way, as story element rather than flagpole.
But the hint of meaningful metaphor is still there, so maddeningly close to conceptualization that the reader keeps waiting for the expositive narration that will Explain All. It never comes. In a way, I, Zombie is a twist on the Robot morality story. The question of the ethics of producing a sentient laboring machine is sharply drawn, using the gimmick of not using metal and processers to produce a robot, but the cold flesh of human corpses. The ultimate twist is that the narrator, a zombie worker, is, through an incompetent accident at the Zombie factory, still alive. Not a reactivated cadaver, but a barely alive person trapped in the zombie lifestyle. This is a reflection of the primary point of robot stories stretching back to Gernsbeck and Asimov, that the Robot is redeemed and set free by the tiny flash of Humaness bestowed by intelligence. This anthropomorphic and cockeyed idea of Humanity being something that evolves at a high order of intelligence and complexity is hoakum straight out of colonialism and the White Man's Burden. Piserchia makes this idea work by having the spark of redeeming humanity be the tiny remnants of a Life destroyed. This shift of focus allows the narrative to explore the stubborn survivability of Human-ness, the ability of the Human spark to carry on within a hellish world order whose Horror knows no bounds.
I, Zombie is a peculiar coda to a peculiar career. Doris Piserchia wrote a pile of good science fiction, but never quite broke through to the popular imagination. It is almost as if the glimmer of feminine viewpoint that permeates her writing, as hard to discern as it is, was enough to scare off the pimply army of Fanboys who supply the money to keep the Baloney Factory churning out product. With an injection of overt Agenda, I, Zombie could have been a milestone book in feminist sci fi, but it was not to be. For the reader who enjoys building political meaning into their reading on their own, this book is a rich source of thought-provoking material. And who knows, maybe Piserchia wanted to make a point without beating the reader over the head, though the politics of I, Zombie are understated to the point of virtual invisibility. Whatever it is, I, Zombie is an appropriately ambiguous headstone for a completely ambiguous writing career.
--from Strange Words
Ashlin, a teenage boy in a the utopian city of Emera, starts to wonder why so many people are deciding to join that weird cult where you cut off your arms and legs to eventually become a cyber-person, a brain in a robot body. And why doesn't anyone want to talk about those strange birds circling the top of Emera's highest mountain? I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but maybe Emera's benign suburban facade is hiding something strange and frightening.
Not particularly focused on feminist issues, but the female characters are interesting, well-rounded, and brave. Minor romance between Grena and Ashlin, on the level of going to have an ice cream soda and then--off again to ride telepathic vultures and battle the alien threat together.
All in all The Deadly Sky is entertaining and light hearted, considering that the whole world is in grave danger. A suburban type of kid learns about war and about responsibility, and saves the world.
Uncomplicated and fun.
--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.
A dystopian novel where another invulnerable monster from somewhere mysterious threatens the gleaming perfect city. Under pressure, Olympus City reveals its flaws; because of the Fluger and its enigmatic opponent, Kam Shar, perhaps humanity is forced to become a little more aware of itself and the squalid world outside the floating cities.
Corrodado, the monster, is even cooler than Mordak from The Spinner. He hates the humans intensely, and maybe it's just my bloodthirstiness but most of the people he kills are so obnoxious and worthless, I'm cheering for the monster most of the time.
None of the major characters are female. Gender isn't really a focus of this book either, so if you are looking for something more feminist, go read Star Rider.
--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.
Another study of humans under pressure. Society breaks down under the threat of the alien monster--as good as reading about accounts of the Great Plague, if you like that sort of thing.
Mordak, a nasty, web-spinning, invulnerable creature, threatens a large city in our not too distant future. He accidentally comes through a rift in space created by a new mining tool called the Rumson Bore. Another monster who manages to be charming even as he is dribbling gobbets of human flesh out of his fanged mouth. You know he's laughing at the pathetic scurrying of the humans. Fit prey for his young, when they hatch!
Meanwhile a bunch of wraithlike old people are living in a system of caves underneath the city. Most of them seem to have escaped from a horribly oppressive nursing home. Numerous other characters are sketched out, very quickly, but in depth; they are destined to either die rather pointlessly or to help in the great escape from the webbed-in city.
I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly "feminist" about Spinner, though it can provide fine material for a feminist slanted reading. Everyone is equally loathsome, which in my book is perfectly feminist and more realistic than the Mary Daly "cult of natural womanhood".
The picture of Rumson and his girlfriend Olivia was incredibly amusing to me. Rumson, an archetypal mad scientist with a bad case of agoraphobia, is a figure of pity here. Piserchia has something to say here about scientists who are out of touch with the world, who never know or particularly care what effects their inventions will have on society. His head is in the sand 100 percent, though you feel sorry for him even after his ultimate treatment of Olivia.
Olivia gets pretty much equally claustrophobic hanging out in Rumson's closet-like, windowless home. She comes and goes as she pleases; she has a job in some distant city. But then he drops valium in her coffee, ostensibly to save her from being caught in the web. Again the picture of a wife being drugged into complacency with her lot. It makes me wonder what Seconal or Valium horrors lie in Piserchia's past; maybe she saw this sort of thing happen to her friends. Anyway, the amusing part (but I'm pretty sick) is when Olivia stuffs his corpse in the deep freeze. She's only slightly disturbed later when she opens the freezer, days later. . . to find that maybe he hadn't been dead after all. Somehow it still makes me giggle. She barely gives it a thought. How horrid!
--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.
Piserchia plumbs the depths of existential despair. Cool sentient rats. Not for the faint of heart.
The most feminist thing about this book is that everyone, male or female, dog-person, rat-person, flying cat-person, God, or barely sentient animal, is equally despicable. It's so far into the future that rats have evolved to human status, with all the parallels possible to our own society. Their world is a dark mirror, a judgement, of our own world--and the verdict: all it deserves is a clean death. Dank, murky, bloody, chaotic, depressing. It is one of my favorite books. It would make a classic movie if anyone had the nerve to do something this dark and anguished. Billion Days of Earth faces nihilism and despair head on, and makes you feel like there's hope, sort of. Well, not the best sounding recommendation, but read on.
Sheen, a flowing metallic blob just born to life, converses with a future rabbit, a "tare". This particular tare happened to be thoughtful, unlike most of the beings on the planet; "It was subnormal in intelligence because it wanted to find sense in this world of Three Million, A.D." Sheen confuses the tare thoroughly by declaring his love for it. Their encounter, and their conversation about love and existence, sets the stage for Sheen's swath of destruction across the planet. The tare tries to put its belief into words:
"One way you can tell what you love is by eliminating everything repulsive to you. You love what's left.""Nothing is repulsive to me."
"Then you must be very inexperienced. As you go along you'll find plenty to turn your stomach. In fact, most of your life will be spent avoiding those things."
Sheen proves the tare wrong as he loves, hates, understands, seduces and absorbs the egos of most of the human (rat) race.
Is Sheen evil incarnate? Is Sheen just the earth's combination weed eater and garbage collector, consuming the weak? I think I would have to read Billion Days of Earth several more times and live a little bit longer to have anything coherent to say about this. But in any case we get to watch the rat-person society go to hell under the pressure of a seemingly malevolent alien force. If you can count as malevolent a creature who offers you eternal Heaven in exchange for your ego.
Rik, rat-descended person and first class asshole, realizes the world is ending. His wife Aril freaked out, went crazy, and got religion after their son Sten was born a vicious atavism. Not just retarded, dangerous; we're talking a mindless giant baby rat with claws and fangs. Aril is one of the few female characters, and she's not all that likeable. However, she provides definite food for feminist thought.
The Gods, the super-evolved descendents of homo sapiens, are worse than the rat-people; decadent, uncaring, isolated from each other and the rest of the world. Toying around pointlessly--like some academics and exceedingly wealthy people--takes all their time, energy, and tremendous power. They don't give a shit about much of anything.
Jak is Rik's best friend. He is a Leng, a creature evolved from ancient dogs; without the artificial hands of the rat-people, they are relatively helpless. He is oddly monkish; Sheen taunts him with his ancestry, implies he is doomed by his compassion, implies he's stupid because he's not cynical. All the characters in Billion Days of Earth are obvious manifestations of certain personality types, if you haven't noticed.
Most obvious feminist moment: Miss Lune, a sour, spinsterly rat-person who works in the artificial hand factory, suddenly realizes that Rik was right. She was living only for her job.
"You were right," she said. "After the plant was gone I had nothing left but myself. It turned out to be enough. . . It took all this chaos to make me realize I never had anything else. I think it's a crime to sit back and watch your individuality go down the drain, but it's much worse when you approve of it. I'm talking about people in general. You don't get self-respect because someone respects you. Women couldn't see that.""They'll see it now," said Rik.
"Only if they have guts. I don't know if they can do it."
"Do you care?"
"I'd be a liar if I said I didn't, but I'll tell you something more important than my caring what happens to them--their caring. If they don't care, it doesn't matter what I think."
Miss Lune is far from being scared of Sheen. She has him relaxed in her living room with his feet up, watching TV. They are going to have friendly philosophical discussions after dinner.
This is how I think of Doris Piserchia; serving tea to the Devil while they politely discuss metaphysics. Like Sheen, she has used her life to stretch her mind to encompass humanity in all its frailty, greed, pettiness, energy and beauty.
--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.
Lone (re-named Jade, later on) and her mount Hinx roam the stars looking for the fabled planet of Doubleluck. She is a jak, a roving space girl with a pioneer spirit, bonded for life with her powerful, dimension warping, telepathic space dog/horse. This big, muscley, smart fourteen year old girl and her brave mount answer all questions, expose all hypocrisy, and save the entire universe from stagnation and death. What could be more satisfying?
Don't miss Jade's sexy love-hate relationship with a buff, jaw-clenching, Clint Eastwood-esque dude named Big Jak. Some mystery and pathos is added by a race of weird grinning creatures, the varks, custodians of the galaxy, who fly by flatulence and can change minds with other species. Cheer her on as she aggressively takes on the depressing feminist allegorical planet Gibraltar, where the gibs work themselves to death in a sexist cultural wasteland, and the dreens hog all the power. Only dreens are allowed to use their telepathy and bond with mounts, though their mounts are like obnoxious little inbred poodles. The evil dreen Rulon wants to brainwash Jade, fill her mind with tranquilizers and her body with humongous breast implants, so that she will breed new vigor into the dreen population as his queen. Hmmm, I wonder if she will kick his sorry ass?
On a more abstract level, Star Rider is about the search for the unknown; call it a nomadic spirit or call it a genetic program to spread ourselves all over the universe. Jaks have been roaming our galaxy for millions of years. There are no new frontiers. The only thing that keeps them from going insane: the myth of Doubleluck, where the streets are paved with gold and it rains diamond every day--and also the faint hope that jaks might someday bridge the gap between galaxies and go on to explore the rest of the universe.
The solitary, vagrant life the jaks lead, disdaining artifacts, refusing responsibility, is deemed to be as sterile in the end as the gibs' acceptance of their life of drudgery and oppression. The power-hungry dreens' narrow vision traps them even as it keeps the gibs in line. The varks are incredibly frustrated at their role as guardians of humanity's path, and their limitations to their own planet. Even Big Jak, the ultimate cool dude, is dissatisfied with his hereditary position as guardian of Doubleluck. Jade, because of her superior telepathic ability to "jink" without limit and thus cross to the next galaxy, and also because of her strong survival instinct, becomes the catalyst that opens dialogue between the different races of the galaxy. Did Piserchia hope, back in 1974, that we would colonize other planets, that this expansion beyond Earth would give humans a better chance of surviving? That may have been part of it.
Above all I am touched by her character Lone/Jade; it lets me see a little of the adolescent girl Piserchia must have been, and must have wanted to be. That most of us probably wanted to be. Driven by ambition, yet able to appreciate beauty; fiercely independent, yet with a ton and a half of loyal, telepathic dog to depend on; able to defend herself against rape, but joyously sexual when she wants to be.
When you're reading Star Rider, you don't have the feeling (as I do when I'm reading a good percentage of feminist sci fi) that the writer said to herself, "OK, there should be a book where a girl does this, and that, and is independent and intelligent, and doesn't die in the end, and men are still given a fair hearing, and damn it, I'm going to sit down and write it." It turns out sounding ponderously formulaic. Star Rider avoids this, by Jade's sponteneity and passion.
This book isn't innocent but it is wildly, almost desperately optimistic, especially when you compare it to the nihilism of A Billion Days of Earth. Gibraltar, the planet that mirrors much of what is depressing about our own world, makes its appearance halfway through the book. Kind of takes you back to when feminists thought that maybe the Revolution would come, that it was already here, and that a girl who grew up knowing a new kind of freedom might effortlessly break down the walls of a structure much more enduring than than the Rock of Gibraltar.
--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.