Strange and interesting sf now available for e-readers!

[rachelmanija]

Six of Doris Piserchia's sf novels are now on Kindle for $3.99. (You'd think Hachette could afford to give them covers.) Piserchia is one of those writers who would probably be more famous if she had been male, or written under a male pseudonym. Then she might have been considered ground-breaking and innovative, rather than merely weird. Her books are wild space adventures with a distinctly hallucinatory atmosphere, often starring young women who go for what they want, whether it's sex or adventure, with no regard whatsoever for the proper place of women or what others might think of them. Sadly, that attitude is still rare.

Typical summary (minus female protagonist): It all began when someone tried to push Creed into the flesh pool to be ingested. The assassination failed, but Creed was never the same again. Because it launched the new cliff-dwellers of Creed's colony onto a new course of life - which could lead to humanity's re-emergence as Earth's masters.

In those far future days, Earth's masters were two trees. Not trees as we know them, but two Everest-high growths, whose sentient roots and fast-growing branches dominated every living thing on the world. Men lived between their arboreal combat.

A few quotes from Goodreads:

Levi: Pretty much as bizarre as I remember. I think another reviewer called Piserchia's work dreamlike, and I'm going to second that description. The kind of dream where everything is extraordinarily complex but it all makes perfect sense at the time and it's only when you try to describe it later that you realize you don't quite know where to start.

Vroom: Still delightful, decades later. I remain convinced Piserchia was either heavily medicated or using recreational pharmaceuticals when writing this. My favorite of her writing.

I remember enjoying Spaceling and Star Rider.

My next mention is not a rec per se given that I have not yet had a chance to read it, and it is less easy to obtain than one might expect from an e-book. But this is the sort of thing that I bet a small but select few of you might really, really like.

Graydon Saunders was one of the most interesting posters on rec.arts.sf.written and .composition back in the Usenet Cretaceous Period. Every now and then, he would post excerpts of his fiction. It was completely obvious to me that he was a very good writer, and also that he was way too strange of a writer to ever be published by a major publishing house. His excerpts, which were always quite evocative and beautiful, tended to read as if they were written from an alternate dimension in which fantasy had taken a completely different direction than it did in our world, and the ur-influences were not Tolkien and Lewis, but Beowulf, Njal's Saga, and "Uncleftish Beholding."

He finally self-published his book. Here it is! The March North, by Graydon Saunders Read the comments to this review for an explanation of how to obtain it. I'm sure Graydon would send a copy if you ask.

ETA: Explanation of how to purchase it is now in the comments of the LJ entry.

Comments

[rmc28]

I found Star Rider in the mobile library when I was a teenager, in the distinctive Women's Press cover. I loved it; much later I found a second-hand copy which I still have. It is quite mad and weird, but I still liked it when last I read it.

(The other books I remember getting out the library repeatedly, also from The Women's Press, were The Planet Dweller and The Watcher, both by Jane Palmer. The former has a protagonist going through menopause and the latter a very bright young woman.)

[ar]

...Okay, I'm intrigued. :D Thank you for the recommendations!

[lilysea]

It's possible that the lack of cover has to do with the ongoing fighting between Hachette and Amazon: I wouldn't be surprised if the books *had* a cover and Amazon removed it, given some of the other things Amazon have done in the Amazon/Hachette conflict...

(eg listing books as unavailable when they were in print as leverage to get a better % of the purchase price...)

[kore]

Wow, these do sound neat!

[intothespin]

I just discovered the Piserchia reprints earlier this week! She is someone I haven't read before.

The covers are the standard for the Gollancz SF line -- I think they are a reproduction of a "classic" line of UK SF, which, seriously, if they've all got to be the same cover, I wish they'd pick a different color.

[sovay]

I remember enjoying Spaceling and Star Rider.

Yes! I discovered her with Star Rider, of which my parents had a copy in the house when I was small, and then when I was older I pursued her mercilessly in used book stores. It kind of blows my mind that DAW-era Tanith Lee was huge and Doris Piserchia was not.

[carbonel]

I just bought Graydon's book from Google Play. The review comment you link to says "(_The March North_ is self-published as an e-book. If you buy it from Google Play you can download a DRM-free EPUB file. I think it's in the Kobo store too.)"

However, I am now totally failing at how to download said DRM-free ePub file. I can read it online (which I don't want to do) or get the Google Play app (which I don't want to do).

Help?

[sineala.livejournal.com]

Whoa, I do think I remember Graydon Saunders from, uh, my days lurking on rasf*. I would happily buy his book if there were a way to get a mobi file (or, really, anything DRM-free that I could then convert to mobi), but I don't know him at all and would be uncomfortable commenting to ask this.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, and in the interest of something --

The books I would have been talking about on rec.arts.sf.* are the Blessed Novel ("Ravens In A Morning Sky", just rejected by Tor's new novella/short novella imprint) and the Doorstop. ("The Human Dress", which might be an ebook someday).

This one, The March North, is relatively new and meant to start a series; Commonweal #2 ("A Succession of Bad Days") and Commonweal #3 are written, and I hope they will be ebooks in their turn. The Commonweal is more of an unholy intersection between the ideals of the French Revolution, Glen Cook, and systems theory than a product of the Northern World. (Which Ravens intensely is and The Human Dress somewhat is.)

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

I am not an e-book reader yet, so reading this saga, from one side, makes me reluctant ever to try getting into reading e-books, but from other side makes me wonder is there a silver lining. The silver lining of people, who like to hunt for their pleasures being more likely to try when it is hard to bag the book they want.

You see, getting books used to be so HARD here - first you had to learn a foreign language and THEN you had to try really hard to get your hands on the books. I know people did - when I started to read SF in English, I found out some books in the public library had autographs of authors. I always wondered - did the recipients get their books, but then got old and poor and had to sell their books to the library? Or were the books taken away for the state before they even reached the people, who had managed to contact the authors? As the Soviet state did keep taking away private property at whim right to its end - as citizens themselves were considered property of the state, so why not?!

Sorry about the off topic pondering, but it just came to my mind.

[larryhammer]

I remember Graydon. Snagged from Kobo.

---L.