I don’t post often. It’s not from lack of trying. I half-start posts and don’t finish them. Once I’ve made some notes my brain shifts into “Task accomplished!” mode. “These sentence fragments are technically a complete idea! Time to think about something else!” If I push past that, two-thirds of the way through any post I become convinced all my ideas are too silly and wrong to keep on with. But the main problem is that for the past few years I have not had the attention span for writing; my thoughts, much of the time, are too disconnected to form arguments.

But I do have those half finished notes. Can I work them up into finished essays? Not really, because I don’t remember the books well enough. But can I turn them into sketchier posts? Maybe! Here’s a post from notes I wrote last year about two Doris Piserchia novels.

A Post From Notes I Wrote Last Year About Two Doris Piserchia Novels

Specifically, Spaceling (1978) and The Dimensioneers (1982). I got interested in Piserchia after reading I, Zombie and randomly picked these books to read next. Which was an interesting coincidence: these are in many ways the same novel.

Both would probably be published as YA today. Both are narrated in first person by a teenaged orphan with a flat affect—their voices are so similar they might as well be the same character. She relates every incident, no matter how hair-raising, with the nonchalant unconcern of a person ordering lunch. She has the rare ability to travel to other worlds through a portal dimension that works differently in each book but is in each case called “D”. In both books she lives in an institution run by an official who considers her a delinquent. Dimension travel is her escape, but to travel she has to dodge aggressive truant officers. In one book traveling to one world turns her into a big cat; in the other she psychically links with a big cat to travel. The plots are picaresque series of chase scenes.

Spaceling

It’s hard to know what to say about Spaceling except that it is batshit, a book structured on the principle of one goddamn thing after another. It’s the near future. There’s a 1970s-style energy crisis. Earth is surrounded by portals to other worlds in the form of colored rings floating in midair and Daryl, our amnesiac narrator, is among the few who can see and use them. All she wants to do is loaf around in interdimensional space, but remember what I said about truant officers? On top of that, dimension travelers are valuable commodities and she gets kidnapped a lot.

The rings change travelers’ bodies to suit the world they’re visiting. Daryl’s favorite destination is a volcanic planet: “Made up of treacherous ground, poison atmosphere and boiling sky, this was a world fit only for monsters or creatures called goths.” Goths being the big catlike animal most visitors turn into, but it’s fun to imagine an entire planet inhabited by the Addams’ extended family.

What follows is a disorienting firehose of weird, a stream of altered consciousness. Criminals kidnap Daryl and hide her on a farm; she’s kidnapped back by the institution; she exasperates them all by coming and going as she pleases. A double act of female truant officers named Pat and Mike chase her Tom-and-Jerry style through Gothland and through a water-world where everyone turns into mermaids. People die in one world and come back to life when they’re dragged home. Daryl turns into an alien seal that lives in vacuum. She acquires a horse that grows wings on other planets. The horse acquires a mate that on Earth turns into a giant Komodo dragon. She discovers Bigfoots are creatures who visit Earth from rings. She stumbles onto a world where pixies spend their days chasing parasites away from the giant toads who protect their cities; their society and domestic arrangements get a surprising amount of worldbuilding. There are a lot of earthquakes.

Alarming things happen to Daryl. She has to rescue another traveler from a world being torn in two; he’s spent a couple days hanging in the air between the halves, constantly screaming. A villain captures her, tortures an ally in front of her, and breaks her fingers; after they get away she mentions offhandedly they spent three months in a hospital. No big deal! Moving on… Daryl narrates everything with amused impatience. She’s above it all, narrating from some distant space we can’t access, never that bothered by what people try to do to her. As with the narrator of I, Zombie it feels like she’s willingly and happily keeping one step away from the rest of society.

A plot does eventually resolve out of this whirlwind. I mentioned the energy crisis. The villains turn out to be a group ramming an oil pipeline through the rings. (Part of the line runs through Gothland and it’s never clear how the enGothified crew is building and maintaining everything without opposable thumbs.) The technology holding the rings steady is causing all the earthquakes. The spaces where Daryl disconnects from humanity have been invaded by extractive capitalists. They’re fracking her dreams.

A Tangent

All this has me thinking about César Aira.

Not that I’m about to directly compare Piserchia to Aira. At her best she’s quite good, and I think genre fans have underrated her, but at no point in her career did bookmakers lay odds on her winning a Nobel. But Aira’s signature literary move is the wild swerve. An oft-cited example is The Literary Conference, whose pseudo-autobiographical narrator segues erratically from solving a Myst-esque puzzle guarding a lost treasure, to cloning Carlos Fuentes for purposes of world domination, to fighting giant silkworms.

You never know where Aira’s going, is the point. Aira doesn’t know where he’s going. The one fact everyone knows about César Aira, the obligatory center of every interview and profile, is the writing process he calls flight forward. Aira starts with a premise then writes a bit at a time without planning or revision, pulling in whatever inspires him in the moment. “In one account of his practice,” writes David Kurnick in a Public Books profile, “he says that if a bird wanders into the café, a bird goes into his book.” Aira’s dedication to this technique has been overstated—he’s admitted in interviews to revising more than he used to. But you can see how this strategy could take him from pirates to giant worms.

This was on my mind having recently read Aira’s Fulgentius. And when I dug out my notes on Spaceling I recalled an online interview on the Doris Piserchia Website in which she says of her own writing process “once I began a book, I wrote it at breakneck speed, finishing in 3 or 4 months and then losing interest to the point that I couldn’t push myself to rewrite.”[1] Piserchia isn’t Aira, but her novels have an improvisatory feeling that reminds me of his work, and I wonder how much of that feeling could stem from similarities in her writing practice.

How much of this improvisatory impression is illusory, I couldn’t tell you—maybe Piserchia had detailed plot-outlines in her head the whole time. And Piserchia’s style has its flaws: Descriptions can feel disorganized, details seem dropped in at whatever point they occurred to the author, and some sentences have a first-drafty awkwardness to them (“‘We’re sick of being killed and then restored but mostly of the first,’ said Pat”). It can be hard to keep track of characters in Spaceling because some have aliases Daryl uses interchangeably and some turn out to be different versions of the same people.

But Spaceling, I, Zombie, A Billion Days of Earth[2]—part of their charm is that they feel like they’re barreling forwards, assembling themselves as they go out of a deep pile of ideas that interact in unexpected ways. They’re intense metamorphic dreams that leave you exhausted on waking. There’s a lot going on there. You’re on a journey and over the next rise may be a space mermaid or an interdimensional Bigfoot or a tiny city of toad-delousing pixies.

Spaceling and The Dimensioneers are modest pulp novels. Judging from the Internet SF Database’s records they were at the time not much noticed or reviewed. I don’t want to sound like I’m overpraising them. But in an age when novels are advertised as lists of tropes, and you pretty much know where nine books out of ten will go by the end of Chapter One, Piserchia’s unforeseeable whims are invigorating.

The Dimensioneers

I have less to say about The Dimensioneers. It’s still intriguingly weird. The unnamed narrator rides a being who evolved from a lion to travel the dimensions and blunders into a war with fascists who ride alligators. The resistance strongarms her into using her dimensional powers to raid U.S. military armories. The truant officer trying to keep her from fleeing her orphanage is a wolfman. This is not explained until the end of the book and it is one of those rare and gratifying explanations genuinely stranger than whatever you were expecting.

But it doesn’t feel as untamed as Spaceling. It’s a more refined and conventionally well-formed novel but by the same token it feels toned down. If you have to read one, try Spaceling, is what I’m saying.

What interests me is that Doris Piserchia cared enough about this book to write it twice. (And, again, the narrators of Spaceling and The Dimensioneers have affects and personalities not far afield from the narrator of I, Zombie, who also feels alienated from her fellow humans.) Before I go further I should emphasize I can’t guess what relevance the theme I’m detecting may have had to Piserchia, or even whether it had any relevance to her at all. Writers write about themes that interest them and contra the popularity of simplistic biographical readings the themes that interest an author will not necessarily have anything to do with their own, real lives—assuming you’re even seeing the same themes the author did. That said, here’s my take.

For Daryl and her nameless counterpart society is a place where they’re regimented and monitored and this is not balanced by any feeling of connection to other people. So they spend most of their books fleeing to places others can’t access. Spaceling and The Dimensioneers are basically portal fantasies. The default theme of the portal fantasy is escape. And it’s hard not to see an escape into an imagined world as symbolizing escape into imagination itself—all the more so now that so many portal fantasies are self-referential meta-SFF, but it was true even decades ago.

(Again, I’m suspicious of reading fiction biographically. But at one point in the interview I linked earlier Piserchia says she “couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life in Fairmont [West Virginia]. It didn’t seem like a part of the world.” One of her escape routes was to spend some time in the regimented environs of the U.S. Navy.)

Metaphorically Daryl is the SFF fan who wants to live in stories, who deals with the world by dissociating—reading or watching television or playing games. The world can’t reach them because, like Sam Lowry in Brazil, they live inside their heads—

—Or, well, that’s the goal. The real world has a troublesome habit of really, y’know, existing. Daryl tries to live in other worlds but Earth pushes its way in to extract their resources. The nameless Dimensioneer’s other worlds follow her home, threatening to spread fascism on Earth. Piserchia is writing about how it feels to be torn between a desire to escape the world and the reality that the world is, by definition, inescapable. You may live in your head but your head is in the world, affecting it and being affected by it, whether you like it or not. At some point you have to accept the world is just where we all have to live, together.

Which doesn’t mean Piserchia’s characters ever quit yearning to pull away. As Spaceling concludes, “being part of a family and being wanted and needed is fine, but every once in a while I experience a little stab of nostalgia when I remember those other days. Nobody wanted me then but I was as free as a bird.” Piserchia’s imagination is a chaotic place, but something in her narrators longs for the chaos.

1.

The more science fiction and fantasy you read the easier it is to guess where any given premise will go. When a book upends your predictions you feel like you’ve got something special. Doris Piserchia—like Margaret St. Clair, another neglected SF writer—has a talent for dodging the predictable narrative. Take the first Piserchia novel I read, I, Zombie (originally published under the name Curt Selby). A company uses remote-controlled indigent corpses as factory labor; the unnamed first-person narrator is mistaken for dead after nearly drowning in a frozen lake and dropped into the labor force. You can picture this story, right? It’s a near-future dystopia and a left-wing satire. The theme is the dehumanization of labor by management, and the central conflict is the protagonist’s struggle to establish their animate status.

That’s not I, Zombie.

Partly that’s because I, Zombie is a space opera set on an icy colony world called Land’s End with indigenous psychic aliens perhaps influenced by Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Some SFF suffers from “one weird thing” syndrome. You get one novum or fantasy gimmick but everything surrounding that novum defaults to normalcy—Occam’s SFF, careful not to multiply weirdness unnecessarily. Zombie laborers or space opera with psychic aliens. (This is often accompanied by the more serious problem that the story has only one thing going on thematically.) Piserchia is generous with her weirdness; her books have multiple weirdnesses that interact productively.

Most memorable science fiction has a touch of the outsider artist. A stylistic tic, eccentric plotting, unexpected thematic obsessions—some eccentricity flags the work as one writer’s and one writer’s alone because it would never occur to anyone else to write that way. Sometimes the touch of the outside is faint. Piserchia, though professional enough, bursts with it like Philip K. Dick.

They have no obvious common preoccupations, but Piserchia feels tonally like Dick’s close cousin. They both write matter-of-factly about a world they see from a cockeyed and paranoid side view. And both write fast and pulpy and sometimes awkwardly. In an online interview Piserchia admits “I might have done better to spend more time on first drafts but once I began a book, I wrote it at breakneck speed, finishing in 3 or 4 months and then losing interest to the point that I couldn’t push myself to rewrite.” You sometimes see her dropping explanations into the flow of her prose at the moments she realizes they’re needed instead of the moments they naturally fit. Phrasings can be awkward (“people were so busy trying to construct mental highways and tributaries that they lost sight of their premises or the need for same.”) And her first-person narrators recount even the most harrowing trials with an odd insouciance—_I, Zombie_ being a case in point. But it all works.

2.

More weirdness: the narrator isn’t trying to prove she’s alive. She’s relaxed about the whole deal, going with the flow. Before drowning she was institutionalized—she’s awkward, unfashionably tall and muscular, and was assumed to be unintelligent.[1] Being ignored by the factory staff doesn’t feel different from being ignored by doctors, nurses, and caretakers. Mix in some heavy social anxiety—“Never in my life had I been able to speak to a normal person”—and healthy contempt for people who talk about her like she isn’t there, and you get why she doesn’t speak up. It feels like the reason we don’t learn her name is she doesn’t think we ought to need it.

Instead she turns the other zombies, who she can control somewhat through her implants, into imaginary friends, reading the memories slowly decaying in their brain cells and making them talk to each other like a kid playing with action figures.

To the colonists this is invisible. They desperately, even cartoonishly, rationalize away evidence the narrator is alive. When the narrator winks at the lunch lady in the mess hall, she gasps and gapes like the villain in a Tex Avery cartoon who just ran halfway around the world and found Droopy already there. Nobody loves a memento mori: people’s eyes slide away from the walking corpses, or glaze over. One of the managers “ignored us as studiously as an alcoholic ignored hallucinations.”

The narrator does not compute. People’s minds slide frictionlessly off phenomena like a living zombie, or a sophisticated indigenous population, that threatens to complicate or upend the order of their world. Says the narrator of one colonist: “She couldn’t cope in an ordinary way… She did whatever she had to do in order not to blow her cork; she accepted the unacceptable.”

One colonist, juvenilely dubbed Peterkin, commits a murder. The investigation is half-assed; it’s another event the colonists can’t get their heads around. But the narrator has Peterkin figured out. Peterkin registers in turn that she seems more aware of the other zombies, and wants her gone. The other humans ignore and unsee things that bewilder them. Peterkin gets rid of them altogether.

You’d think he’d just whack her. Who’d notice? Instead he sets up indirect Wile E. Coyote traps—accidentally on purpose leaving her out on the ice, fiddling with the other zombies to make them attack her—which she foils by accident or by foresight. Peterkin is an ex-con with an implant preventing violent rages; its designers didn’t notice it wouldn’t stop cold, impersonal murders. On a literal level this explains why he resorts to death traps. But there’s a sense he can’t directly acknowledge the narrator is alive. An overt fight would break the rules of the game.

3.

For the narrator, undeath is play. She has free run of the colony as long as she pretends to follow orders. She happily occupies herself raiding the kitchen and sabotaging her work. At one point she destroys a domed city with an asteroid-sized glob of petroleum, an event she describes with the same distant affectlessness as the time she upends a tub of leftover salad on the guy directing the zombies on garbage duty.

One of the main arguments in David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules is about hierarchy and knowledge. Put simply, people at the bottom of a hierarchy understand much more about the people above them than vice versa. The people above have power over the people below, so the people below have to spend time and energy understanding who the uppers are, what they want, and how the system they all live under works; Graeber calls this interpretive labor. Conversely, the uppers have the same power over the lowers whether they understand the lowers or not.

As an assumed zombie, the narrator is so far below everyone else she’s completely illegible to the factory’s hierarchy—but, as the Fantastic Four could tell you, sometimes invisibility is a superpower. The narrator learns everything about the colonists while they learn nothing about her—and she loves it. Not that the asymmetry in interpretive labor doesn’t hurt her in some ways. And the people her fellow zombies were before they died, and the indigenous people of Land’s End. She occasionally takes a moment to snark about it. At one point one of the other zombies—who, remember, are actually the narrator having imaginary conversations—marvels at how he’s worth more to society as a corpse than he ever was alive.

But mostly she’s not thinking about this. She’s watching the colonists with mingled pity and contempt. They’re just as screwed by the information asymmetry—not that they’d ever know it. It’s the reason the narrator sees through Peterkin while the colonists find him irritating but don’t grasp that he’s a mortal danger. Their place in the pyramid of interpretive labor renders the colonists too ignorant even to keep themselves alive.

The narrator befriends the Land’s Enders, who can see perfectly well she’s alive. They don’t speak but can communicate telepathically through her implant. They think she’s different from other humans. She protests she’s just the only person who bothered to find anything out about them. The L.E.’s are aquatic; Land’s End is a water-world stuck in an artificial ice age. An atomic engine in just the right place will start a chain reaction and melt all the ice, turning Land’s End back into a planetary ocean, impossible to colonize.

So the narrator steals one. In another book this would be a major focus, a locus of complications and suspense, even the main plot. Instead, the narrator just grabs the engine from storage and walks out with it. It chugs away in the background for the rest of the book. No one is paying attention. The colonists think it’s peculiar that the ice is getting slushy but never understand what’s happening even after it dawns on them they need to evacuate. The counterintuitive way to handle a plot can be the right way: in a book about un-seeing, keeping the world-changing revolution and climate emergency in the background works thematically. And the way the colonists are slow to notice the planet warming up, even as their base progressively floods, resonates in the 21st century in ways Piserchia can’t have imagined.

4.

Like a lot of SFF from across the political spectrum I, Zombie celebrates rebellion. But the narrator does not openly, noisily protest. She’s not interested in rebellion as an identity. She looks for opportunities to take and exercise power from the place where she finds herself. Her social invisibility allows her to act as omniscient narrator and stage manager, directing the action around her while remaining unseen. She grabs the corporate pyramid from its base and inverts it, and no human ever realizes it. She’ll return to Earth with a new identity but will never be anyone’s hero.

Uniquely, I, Zombie turns social invisibility from an injustice into a wish-fulfillment fantasy for introverts, a celebration of solidarity between those who live in an industrial world but are too weird for industry. It’s a book about alienation in which alienation is pretty good, actually. I don’t think any other novel would take exactly this slant on this material. Piserchia’s point of view is unapologetically hers alone, and that’s as good an argument as any for why she still deserves to be read.