PISERCHIA, Doris (Elaine)

(1928-)

   US writer, born and raised in West Virginia, in the US Navy 1950-54. She began publishing short fiction with "Rocket to Gehenna" for Fantastic in 1966. Her first novel, the remarkable and densely plotted VAN VOGT-style revenge drama Mister Justice (1973 dos), appeared after she had established some reputation in shorter forms, one of her stories being included in Best Science Fiction for 1972 (anth 1973) ed Frederik POHL. Star Rider (1974) recounts first-person adventures in a chokingly vividUniverse, versions of which recur throughout her work: events are pellmell, and the protagonist's far-flung quest for Doubleluck, a planet of dreams, constantly becomes enmired in that environment. A Billion Days of Earth (1976) similarly loses energy towards its close, but depicts its FAR-FUTURE venue with precision and eloquence; its ratmen with mechanicalclaws for hands are a particularly resonant notion, and demonstrate DP's clear creative preference for ALIENS, who rarely fail to outshine her human performers. Earthchild (1977) is similarly set on a far-future Earth under a similar threat of termination. Later novels - like Doomtime (1981) and Earth in Twilight (1981) - likewise tend to subordinate human protagonists to her ornate and sometime animate mises en scene, so that she is at times both daring and a trifle coy in subject matter and style: not even the female protagonists of Spaceling (1978) or The Dimensioneers (1982), though enjoying DP's approval, genuinely manage to dominate theirtexts. Blood Country (1981) and I, Zombie (1982), both as by Curt Selby, the latter a genuine sf novel about the posthumous revivification - for purposes of forced labour - of suicides, are also of interest. 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 US NEW WAVE; but she has not published since 1983, and the course of her further development cannot properly be guessed.

   JC

   Other works: The Spinner (1980); The Fluger (1980); The Deadly Sky (1983).

   See also: CHILDREN IN SF; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; LIVING WORLDS.