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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Notes on Mr. Justice.
1. What's up with the title? The title character is spelled "Mr." throughout the book. DP referred to him as "Mr." in our interview. The "Mister" is cute and quaint and probably more memorable than "Mr.," but it's wrong. Note to future editor: correct title.
2. The book depicts a "wilderness of mirrors" straight out of a Cold War spy story. Two time-traveling supermen (Justice and Bingle) are the rival superpowers. Both have "armies" operating outside the law. Both have daughters they cherish and are covertly grooming sons-in-law. SPAC, the school for gifted "freaks," appears to be run by both sides (or is so infiltrated by both that there's no distinction). It's like The Village in the Prisoner TV series. Who's really in charge?
3. In our interview I said there was no sex in the novels, relative to the short stories. Apologies to Doris. This book has a female sexual predator named Godiva who snaps one victim's neck after having sex with him, and an4lly r4pes another. Also there is a horrible scene of child r4pe. (I have to put in the 4s to keep ghouls off the page.) Daniel's relationship with the barely pubescent Pala, although chaste, would probably raise a few eyebrows with the God Squad.
4. I added a passage to the Excerpts Page: It's where Daniel looks at the seven photographers' work, trying to nail Mr. Justice through the style of photos MJ takes of his "accuseds." This is a great example of Piserchia transcending genre: using a purely subjective, poetic act of art criticism to catch a perp. Later, there's a passage where Daniel talks to a "doll" (supercomputer), trying to reason his way to Justice, that's also very poetic.
5. Throughout the book, characters keep asking, "Is he [MJ] Superman?" Many of the concerns of the story--about vigilantism, morality, power, personal obsession--surfaced ten years later in Alan Moore's brilliant comic book series Watchmen. I wonder if Moore knew this novel?
6. I assume it's Mr. Justice who puts up the red sign, flapping in the breeze between skyscrapers, announcing that he "has a daughter." But if Pala is his daughter, why announce it this late? She's almost 20! Is it because her job as a mole in Bingle's organization is done, and she's safely out of harm's way? Or is because she herself has had a daughter (with Daniel)? Wouldn't that be Justice's granddaughter? Or is the baby "his" daughter because she, not Pala, will inherit his powers?
7. Why does Pala first appear to Eric Fortney naked, stuffed into a trashcan? Does she, like Bingle's daughter Leona, have incomplete or unpredictable powers? Isn't Justice a bit callous to use his 12-year-old this way (working undercover for Fortney)?
Here's a challenge: try finding the Doris Piserchia Fan Page in Yahoo! Clubs (sorry, it's Yahoo! Groups now ) without using an existing bookmark. It's not in the index of Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors. Searching "Piserchia" gets you nowhere and "Doris Piserchia" pulls up a Doris Day chat group. Looks like the only way to find it is to click though 662 groups, ten groups at a time. I gave up after 40. Thanks, Yahoo! Also, thanks for all the new pop-ups lurking behind every pillar and post! Also, thanks for the error message that came up when I tried to post this rant! Isn't it fun watching erstwhile hot properties of the dot-com era decay into ruins?
Science Fiction?
Before I get to DP's short stories I wanted to say a few things on the subject of genre. Bruce
Sterling came up with the term "slipstream" to describe
books that aren't precisely mainstream literature but
aren't science fiction either. I believe he wants his
own writing to escape the taint that sf has acquired
because of its awful marketing conventions (Buck Rogers
and “peeled eyeball” covers) and popular perception
as a domain of geeky, fan-fiction-writing amateurs.
Knowing what the field has to offer, when I hear my
literature-reading friends say "I don't read science fiction," I get
steamed. On the one hand, it's hard to defend a genre that
looks so juvenile, but on the other, you have to wonder if they've ever read Burroughs or Pynchon or Orwell. DP's novels were
all originally published within the sf field, where
they no doubt baffled many an adolescent boy, and I
sometimes fantasize about how they might be marketed the
second time around. I imagine sleek covers with muted
computer graphics and jacket copy describing DP as "a
literary dimension-hopper, blinking from one set of
genre conventions to another in relentless,
techno-pastoral-visionary narratives." Is that farfetched? Look at what she's written: a metaphysical detective story (Mister
Justice), Night of the Living Dead- style horror (The
Spinner), a proto-cyberpunk, Taylorist nightmare (I,
Zombie), books set in the future that read like ancient
mythology (Doomtime, Earthchild), and an Appalachian
vampire yarn (Blood County)!! If Jack Womack and J. G.
Ballard can be discreetly moved over to the "fiction"
section at your local bookstore, why not this writer?
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.