Spaceling

by Doris Piserchia, George Barr (Cover Art)

The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth's atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape.

Spaceling is the story of Daryl's desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation.

But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

239 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Also wrote under the psudonym Curt Selby.

Reviews

[Carlex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars.

A curious novel, totally New Wave.

Synopsis: Adventures and intrigues in which a 15-year-old girl finds herself involved, in a future where some humans can travel interdimensionally. In other dimensions the human body transforms into a totally different being, adapted to the new environment. For example, in a volcanic world uninhabitable for humans, the character becomes a sort of giant otter (see some covers of this book).

It gets a little confusing with all the interdimensional back and forth and also for all the characters and how they come in and out of the story. At some point the story evokes or suggests to me what I assume would be an astral travel or a drug-type experience.

An interesting author, until now I had not read any of her works, but I plan to read more of hers.

[Akiva ꙮ · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

I really like the dizzying narrative leaps in time and place. Unlike many first-person narrators, Daryl tells her story like she's standing there in front of you---she skips the parts she considers uninteresting or irrelevant, and you have to infer her (sometimes warped, sometimes unreliable) thought process. Not everything is spelled out! You can return to Spaceling over and over and understand a little more each time.

(5 July 2013) I don't know where I got Spaceling other than that it was during high school, but I recently rediscovered it and remember it as a very weird but very awesome and intricate book.

[William Cardini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spaceling is one of the weirdest books I have ever read. It's the first-person POV of a teenage girl named Daryl who lives in a post-Peak-Oil, energy starved Earth where some people can travel to different dimensions via floating rings. These people are called muters because when they travel to another dimension, their body morphs to accommodate their new environment. It's never quite clear whether these dimensions are other planets in the universe or different universes entirely but it doesn't really matter.

Daryl is in many ways a standard SF protagonist, an orphaned amnesiac who gets caught up in events of great import, but the charm of the book is in her meandering, stream-of-conscious narration. It took me a while to get into Piserchia's prose style, where events are described in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion – some facts are clear at the beginning of a scene but other important details are not mentioned until paragraphs later – but as I relaxed into the story and the setting, I experienced it as a dream, not worrying too much about the underlying logic but just enjoying the journey.

Although the plot takes a while to get going, once it does, there is a strong central mystery that is resolved satisfactorily. And Piserchia ratchets up the weird dimensions and psychedelic scenes.

[Derek Keeping · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember getting this book as a selection from a Science Fiction book club. Probably when it first came out. I would have been in my early teens at the time and was a voracious reader.
Somewhere along the line I lost the book and forgot the title and a lot of things about it. For some reason part of it stuck with me and I looked for it on and off based just on the memory of a story of an orphan who traveled to different worlds using coloured rings.
Well I finally found the book again and re-read it. It was as good as I remembered, but I also understood it a lot more than I did back them. It’s got a fairly convoluted plot which can seem a bit dis-jointed in places, but if you stick with it, it does make sense in the end. I’d go so far as to say the dis-jointed feeling adds to the story as you share the confusion the characters feel. At the same time you can just read it as a wild adventure as I did when I was young and enjoy it just as much.
I wouldn’t call it a classic, but it is an enjoyable read and I’d recommend it both as a young adult book, and was an interesting adult story.

[Robbinette · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay so I received this book in a subscription box I ordered for second hand science fiction and fantasy books. To me I would classify this as vintage science fiction. It was written in the 70's. And this was also a DNF for me. I got through to 75 pages. It was about a young teenage girl that could hop from world to world through warp holes or something of the like. The writing was very choppy and it was difficult for me to keep track of what was going on at any given time and why it was going on. We would hop from subject to subject and I would actually flip back and forth to see if I had missed the book discussing something but no we just hopped to water world, hopped to D2(lava world) hopped to being held hostage, hopped to running away. I still can't even tell you what was going on in the book because the change of subject was so erratic I couldn't keep track of what was going on. This book might be perfect for someone else but I didn't enjoy reading it, at all.

[Snood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like every other work I’ve read from Piserchia, Spaceling is weird, meandering, and overflowing with creativity. It’s a shame she’s so little remembered today.

[skozey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the 5 or 6 of Piserchia's works that I've read (so far) nothing gets less than 5 stars, but with that in mind I would rate Spaceling (along with A Billion Days Of Earth) an easy 7 [out of 5] stars! With characters that could be the inspiration for illustrations by the likes of Basil Wolverton, Wally Wood, Norman Saunders or Bernie Wrightson, Doris Piserchia was delving into uniquely imagined worlds set well apart from her more often read 1970s science fiction contemporaries.
Sadly, all of her work is 'out of print' so the copy I read was a public library/inter-library loan, but I think I'm going to hunt up a used copy as this is one of those rare finds which I may be compelled to re-read, or at least loan to deserving friends. There are also sections of Spaceling that were so poetically striking I'm thinking I would like to commit them to memory:

"In the Universe through which I traveled, nothing was stationary but all was in motion. Little bits of matter were as significant as worlds because I could discern them and comprehend the service they rendered.
"Here the planets spun so fast they resembled flat discs falling like a never ending row of dominos. The colors of the rainbow were everywhere around me, pastel and glittering, flashing past me like an assembly line of fragile pieces of light. Earth was a revolving coin that enveloped me, appeared to flash on over my head and then was gone..."

Very beautiful stuff! And the story's momentum is never compromised, it remains a fast paced mystery/thriller embodied in a thought provoking hunk of sci-fi.

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in a weird vaguely futuristic version of the United States, a century or so after dimensional portals have started floating around everywhere. Some humans and some individuals of other animal species can see and go through them and some can't. Once through them, you transform into some kind of alien animal and anything else you bring with you transforms in some unpredictable way. Daryl, the main character, is an amnesiac with no sense of caution who can do more: she can actually call a portal to her when she needs to. She spends a lot of time at a prison-ish school where the government confines children who can use portals, but obviously that's not much of a limitation to her, and she stumbles into a big conspiracy sort of thing - it's confusing - that leads to a lot of intrigue. The plot is suspenseful and the characters interesting. But the setting doesn't hang together with science at all even though there is some determined hand-waving in that direction.

[Sue Chant · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's no real story, just a series of unconnected incidents recounted in the way a child would - "then I flew on a flying horse, then I fought a big bear" blah, blah. I got over half way through but it was just pointless.

[Dawn Cancellieri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Somewhat boring with lots of action adventure chase scenes that I found myself skimming through.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, a little disjointed, and deeply strange.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are into sci-fi, I bet you've never read a story like this. Go hopping from one dimension to another, body altering to suit the environment. A young girl with amnesia and an unusual ability to control 'rings' (the portals to which you travel dimensions) stumbles upon a universe altering conspiracy and unintentionally gets caught up in the maddness. I enjoyed the story, but I will admit it was difficult to follow at times due to the constant and sometimes very rapid dimensional travel. The most notable thing about this novel for me was the vocabulary. The author has an extensive knowledge of words that I'd never heard of. I feel that to read this book without a dictionary close by would be doing the author and yourself a great disservice. Not only a wonderful and unique story, but an awesome learning experience too. My only complaint is that the ending felt a tad rushed, but overall I like.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the setting and minor adventures that do the world-building of the first third of the book. The characters and setting has stuck with me for 42 years since I last read it, which speaks to the writing.

Overall, very glad I found it (it's available as an ebook!) and had the opportunity to re-read it

[CJ Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an old old book (50's, 60's?). The protagonist has a personal way of moving between the worlds around the home world. That's why he's a Spaceling. I think. This is probably a YA book but don't let that stop you from reading it.

[Kyanna Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my all-time favorite book since I found it in my dad's collection in the attic. I can't tell you how many times I've read it now. The way this author puts you in the body of the main character, I could FEEL what they felt through each page. Absolutely beautiful and original.

[Jim Wharton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was one of my absolute favorites as a kid. I rode around the neighborhood looking for rings. Sadly, for me, the book doesn’t hold up. There’s almost no plot, characters just kind of cruise around doing things. It’s very freeform. It was a slog that my nostalgia barely dragged me thru.

[Jeff Cuscutis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remembered classic

I first read this more than 30 years ago and it stuck with me. I kept looking for it, but I only found it recently and it was just as good as I remembered.

[Jorgon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully psychedelic and certainly ahead of its time.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

What the heck did I just read?

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered this in paperback (which I still have, in a box, somewhere on the attic).

Great story, great protagonist.

Recommended.

[James DiGiovanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know how to rate Doris Piserchia’s books because they’re so singular. This would prolly get an F in a class at a masters writing program because they’d grade it in the stuff that is almost irrelevant to what Piserchia is doing. Like, the story is often advanced by exposition, the characters are thin and there are too many of them, and the plot is too complex for the length of the book, which is why so much of it is just narrated by the characters. But it’s not really about the characters or the traditional novelistic niceties of pacing and showing events in a story. It’s about creating a world that makes sense internally but is so bizarre as to be impossible, and which gives Piserchia space for her insanely original and creative flights of fancy. So as a novel, mediocre? But as a, I dunno, an example of Pishercherature, it’s as great as all her stuff.

[Dee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doris Piserchia, while very entertaining and with such wonderful characters-especially gritty, smart, tough-as-nails young women as in Spaceling, well. Well. Doris seems to get lazy about structuring her longer books. Spaceling might be the longest, and I rate it the least of her works.

I usually pick books to rave about but jeeesh. I'm disappointed.

I can't recommend Doris' writing enough, but not this book.

Read "Dimensioneers" if you want to get much the same main character and similar science-fantasy premises, wrapped in a much shorter, more engaging book.

[Mauisis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doris Piserchia's main characters are often young women. Somewhat of a novelty for sci fi, and for sci fi of the 1970's. Her characters go places, and often take the trip alone, sometimes with others, though not by choice. This makes her novels as much adventure as sci fi. Her characters are often trying to find out who they are and their purpose and their place in the universe, as we all are.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have recently become enamored of this author. I encourage those who read to read her. Doris has a knack for humanizing and emotionalizing her characters that is far too rare in SF&F. The fantastic is just a background for her as she explores the subtle neuroses of an abandoned girl. This piece seems inspired by Phillip K. Dick, but is written at a level he rarely seemed to reach.

[William Schenk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating Read

Some may not get this book, but it is one of my all-time favorites. I first read this at Barb's place during a summer in St. Louis when I was in college. It took me 20 years to find a copy for myself and I finally did. It takes a special person to understand and appreciate this story. Enjoy!

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I recall picking this science fiction book club edition at a used bookstore on Devon, I don't recall the contents enough to comment.

[Lexi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm guessing it's for young adult, but I thought it was quite good. Piserchia creates a fascinating world peopled with interesting characters. Much fun.

[Vroom · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[SciFiOne · Rating 3 out of 5]

1988 grade C+

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Piserchia needs to be better known. Her imagination knows no bounds.