Doris Piserchia Weblog


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The Doris Piserchia Weblog.

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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Justin E.A. Busch publishes a small fanzine (as in physically small -- each issue is 4 1/2 x 3 inches) called Dreams Renewed: Essays on Rediscovering Neglected Pleasures of Fantastic Fiction. His first issue discusses Doris Piserchia's 1981 novel Earth in Twilight. Here's an excerpt:

Some critics bracketed [Piserchia] with the New Wave. [Her] breathlessly paced prose, combined with an underlying sense of anger about humanity's indifference to its own destructive choices and actions, does occasionally resonate with the tone of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds. Now, though, it is clear that she is really a literary descendant of A.E. Van Vogt, pursuing complicated plots across vividly imagined landscapes portrayed through constantly shifting perspectives. Her aliens, especially, act in ways bizarre in a human context commonsensical on their own mental and physical terms. Unlike most of Van Vogt's work, though, Piserchia's is imbued with a mordant sense of humor, which adds an appealing touch of grotesquerie at apposite moments...

For information on this and other essays in the Dreams Renewed series, write to Justin E.A. Busch, 308 Prince St., #422, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55101.


- tom moody 5-31-2020 10:11 am [link]


Star Rider, German book cover, found on the Bookogs site (shouldn't that be Bibliogs?).

The edition was 1980, which kind of explains the vaguely punk/new wave image, which misconstrues the novel (Jaks didn't fly through space, they rode dimension-hopping space animals).

Weird nipples, and some kind of nipple-like growth on the thigh -- what's all that about?


- tom moody 5-30-2020 5:31 pm [link]


A couple of Gateway's Doris Piserchia ebooks recently got new covers: Star Rider and Spaceling.

These aren't as generic as the solid yellow fields of the other books' covers but they are still pretty generic, and have nothing to do with the stories.

But it's some attempt to market the books, at least, even to teenage boys.


- tom moody 11-07-2017 7:22 am [link]



The Doris Piserchia page at Gateway Books has announced that a few more of her e-books were "upcoming" for a couple of years now. If you click (or tap) through to the book list, however, you see that all 13 of her novels are available, including the two she published under the name "Curt Selby" (Blood County and I, Zombie). These books are carried by both the major e-book retailers I checked. Congratulations again to Doris Piserchia on getting all her novels back in circulation! Naturally her fans would like to see a compendium of her short stories next.

- tom moody 10-25-2015 1:14 pm [link]


John Clute's entry on Doris Piserchia in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is online and has been tweaked slightly from its original wording in print. Besides the addition of distracting links to other tagged content (yes, we know what "Aliens" are) there is a slight harshening of the assessment of Piserchia's later work.

The last sentence now reads:

In her self-consciousness, and in the sense she conveys that landscape drowns action (rather than vice versa), Piserchia seemed for a period very much a member of the US New Wave; but her later works lacked some the bounteous energy of the earlier work, she stopped publishing in 1983, and there was no further development in a career that had flourished, absorbingly, for only a decade.

Whereas it used to read:

In her self-consciousness, and in the sense she conveys that landscape drowns action (rather than vice versa), DP seemed for a period very much a member of the U. S. new wave; but she has not published since 1983, and the course of her further development cannot properly be guessed.

At the time of the original entry Clute didn't know if Piserchia would write again and possibly didn't want to come down too hard on the late work. At the time of re-writing he knew it was over and decided to assess which phase had more "bounteous energy." It's almost as if he counted the cessation of writing against her, though, creating a "flame sputtering to darkness" narrative. I don't agree with that: The Spinner, Doomtime, and the Selby books are among her best, and they all came at the end.

Having recently re-read Doomtime and Earthchild, I see what Clute means about the work's coyness (an adjective he uses in both entries). It's not so much cuteness as a lack of seriousness about telling a real story. Sometimes the narratives lose credibility as say, bickering characters have a conversation that seems more like the author talking to herself because, what the hell, no one is reading this. Philip K Dick did that, too, and when it works it's subversive. At any rate, I recall such passages in all phases of Piserchia's writing (for example, conversations with Sheen in A Billion Days of Earth), not just the late novels.


- tom moody 3-25-2013 2:07 pm [link]