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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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