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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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