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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Looking back at a post I wrote 17 years ago (good grief, has it been that long?), I've had some second thoughts. I was chiding Doris Piserchia for not using the internet to get her stories out there, at a point where they'd been out of print for 20 years. Her approach was to protect her copyrights and let people find the work in libraries and used book stores. In hindsight, with all her books back in circulation as e-books from a major publisher, she was right and I was wrong. At the time I wrote the post I was net-bullish in a way I am not now, post-Snowden and Zuckerberg. Holding the work back, especially when it had already been published in the big leagues, and waiting for publishers to come back around to her, was the right way to go.
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.
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?
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.
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.