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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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