In a 2000 interview, Doris Piserchia (1928-2021) makes a number of quite revealing statements about the life of a mid-century, mostly straight-to-paperback SF and fantasy author:
“Most of my editors didn’t even edit, let alone change anything.”
“I wrote much too fast and didn’t do nearly enough rewriting.”
“I don’t even know if [the cover artists] read the books.”
“I kind of like not being in the rat race [of submitting work for publication]. Lately, I just write for me.”
Her books read exactly as you might think. Since coming across a copy of Star Rider (1973), her first novel, within the past year for a dollar, I've read The Deadly Sky (1984), her last, and I'm currently on a third, A Billion Days of Earth (1976), her second.
Her writing is funny, often brilliant, but like most paperback genre fiction I've sampled of the era, is begging for editorial intervention, especially to shore up weak and wandering plot structure, balance out uneven conceptual development, and weed out underdeveloped themes and entire sections that go nowhere except a dead-end tangent.
Such defects, by the way, are by no means limited to her work, nor are they in any way due to gender. Even the most celebrated works of the most celebrated (male) authors of the era and genre suffer similar drawbacks, I have found.
I have a theory about fantastic fiction of the period, that there was neither time nor money (the stakes were simply not that great, in other words) for overworked editors to feel comfortable prevailing upon authors to make extensive rewrites, or to rethink plot structure in consideration of creating a gratifying reader experience.
Editors more or less voted up or down, as it were, about whether to publish a work or not; accepted manuscripts were professionally if mechanistically proofread, for the most part (I seldom find spelling or grammatical errors in pulps or paperbacks of the twentieth century, unlike even university press scholarly works published in the twenty-first century, which are often riddled with typos!).
But there seems to have been an "experimental" ethos or ideology for sci-fi and fantasy fiction of the 1950s through the 1980s, the professed desire not to interfere with an author's ecstatic vision; I find this even in works by Asimov, Bradbury, and Philip Jose Farmer.
Readers, presumably, weren't reading fantastic fiction in those days for tight, thoughtfully unfolding plots, coherent character studies, or the kinds of gratifying literary experiences that come from such carefully revised works. They were reading for mind-blowing concepts, wild rides, and bizarre juxtapositions arising from sudden changes in tone and direction mid-story. At least, that is what will probably be argued.
One can imagine Doris Piserchia, an author from West Virginia, typing her manuscripts on her kitchen table, her household of kids running amok underfoot, and dashing her work off by courier to waiting publishers, only too happy to have material to put on the publishing schedule. The works of hers I've read so far seem ahead of their time; she had a YA sensibility before "young adult" became the hottest category in contemporary publishing.
Her characterization and dialogue are rich and snarky; although the futuristic or far-off settings are integral to the story, the heaviest science fiction tropes (usually world-saving heroics) often seem thrown in willy-nilly toward the end as an afterthought, as if the author had somehow forgotten to fill a certain quota for the genre that seemed appropriate to her mind. And her stories all seem to wrap up prematurely, which is a way of saying the reader is left wanting more.
Still, there is something bracing, and satisfying, about reading such inventive material as this; but one also has to wonder what could have been the result if time and money had allowed a few rounds of revisions, and some careful reconsideration of plot structure. There is not much more than that separating the work of this period, and Doris Piserchia's in particular, from more literary, critically-acclaimed work.
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