What do you think?
Rate this book
Earth in Twilight
Laredo Space Base hadn't sent a ship to Earth for hundreds of years before the Project Deep Green survey craft was launched. Only one thing was known: the planet humankind had so long ago vacated was a wasteland with nothing on it but poisonous flora and small, murderous denizens.
That's what they taught astronaut Ferrer Burgoyne and as a result he was totally unprepared for the teeming jungle stretching farther than his eyes could see. He was even moer unprepared for the slightly green humanoids who greeted him. Obviously the scientists of Old Earth had done more in their labs than just mess around mixing human and plant cells. As sure as Ferrer Burgoyne was an astronaut the new men of Earth were the descendants of those hidden, forbidden experiments.
How then could Burgoyne continue his mission: to defoliate Earth with the deadly chemical Deep Green and prepare Earth for the return of his species?
That's what they taught astronaut Ferrer Burgoyne and as a result he was totally unprepared for the teeming jungle stretching farther than his eyes could see. He was even moer unprepared for the slightly green humanoids who greeted him. Obviously the scientists of Old Earth had done more in their labs than just mess around mixing human and plant cells. As sure as Ferrer Burgoyne was an astronaut the new men of Earth were the descendants of those hidden, forbidden experiments.
How then could Burgoyne continue his mission: to defoliate Earth with the deadly chemical Deep Green and prepare Earth for the return of his species?
156 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
1 person is currently reading
87 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 24, 2023
A non-binary tribe of tree dwellers who hide their gender from everyone, including themselves. A giant bug that thinks it’s a human and hates its spouse because she keeps laying eggs instead of giving birth to a "live boy." An "insurance salesman" whose business consists of "insuring" that various wild, mutated creatures can’t harm the individual who has taken out a "policy," but who always ends up running away from his clients. An intelligent pathogen that evolves from a semi-sentient bacterium into a biped that spreads disease far and wide....
Welcome to the world of Doris Piserchia’s Earth in Twilight.
You don’t read a Piserchia novel because you expect to find beautifully written prose or perfectly placed details. Nor do you read a Piserchia novel for its characterization, since the characters are never well drawn or thought out. You don’t even read a Piserchia novel for its plot, which will inevitably be threadbare, full of holes, or hopelessly silly.
You read a Piserchia novel because it will be weird. Damned weird. Not weird like an obscure late-night cult film you’ve heard about but never committed yourself to watching, but weird in a way that makes you wonder, seriously, whether the author was insane when she was wrote this book, whether you might be reading something that sprang from the mind of a schizophrenic.
Well, you’ll counter, Piserchia’s novels can’t be any weirder than Philip K. Dick’s, because he is the king of weirdness, the Master of the Upside Down. And there’s something to be said for the weirdness of Dick’s books, except that in every universe Dick creates, there is still a tether that connects you, the reader, to a reality that can be conceptualized. In every one of his novels, no matter how strange the premise, readers can still wrap their heads around what Dick is doing with the universe he’s created.
Not so in a Piserchia novel. Piserchia’s novels follow the dream-logic of fairy tales; reality shifts and bends and twists, and readers of Piserchia are likely to find themselves pushing back against the story because it seems to undermine the very idea of cogency and of unchanging Laws. Dive too far into the dream, and you might not come out; better to have some distance between yourself and the madness of this world of words.
Reading Piserchia isn’t unsettling because her prose suggests that reality might not be what we think it is but because it suggests that reality is a malleable thing, like a Claymation movie, where the passing of time is the only governing principle and the only thing that won’t be negated or twisted or turned around. And what’s even stranger than this is that Piserchia doesn’t seem to do it on purpose; she doesn’t write in slipstream-like prose, and she doesn’t employ clever tricks of narration to toy with the reader’s expectations or their perception of time and space. This fable-like quality isn’t a one-off effect like Anna Kavan’s gemlike Ice—it’s who Piserchia seems to be as a writer, for better or for worse.
And there are moments when it seems to be for worse. Piserchia’s novels aren’t written in a way that you can say, once you finished, that you felt some gratification in how this or that character arc was played through. Nor are there redeeming messages of morality or philosophical questions that will be posed and possibly answered, a la Philip K. Dick. The fact is, you don’t know what the takeaways are after you've read a book by Piserchia.
And that's the beauty of it, of course: the not knowing. The uncertainty. That's what makes these unreal books seem so real, because ultimately they are as confusing and as unknowable as life itself.
Welcome to the world of Doris Piserchia’s Earth in Twilight.
You don’t read a Piserchia novel because you expect to find beautifully written prose or perfectly placed details. Nor do you read a Piserchia novel for its characterization, since the characters are never well drawn or thought out. You don’t even read a Piserchia novel for its plot, which will inevitably be threadbare, full of holes, or hopelessly silly.
You read a Piserchia novel because it will be weird. Damned weird. Not weird like an obscure late-night cult film you’ve heard about but never committed yourself to watching, but weird in a way that makes you wonder, seriously, whether the author was insane when she was wrote this book, whether you might be reading something that sprang from the mind of a schizophrenic.
Well, you’ll counter, Piserchia’s novels can’t be any weirder than Philip K. Dick’s, because he is the king of weirdness, the Master of the Upside Down. And there’s something to be said for the weirdness of Dick’s books, except that in every universe Dick creates, there is still a tether that connects you, the reader, to a reality that can be conceptualized. In every one of his novels, no matter how strange the premise, readers can still wrap their heads around what Dick is doing with the universe he’s created.
Not so in a Piserchia novel. Piserchia’s novels follow the dream-logic of fairy tales; reality shifts and bends and twists, and readers of Piserchia are likely to find themselves pushing back against the story because it seems to undermine the very idea of cogency and of unchanging Laws. Dive too far into the dream, and you might not come out; better to have some distance between yourself and the madness of this world of words.
Reading Piserchia isn’t unsettling because her prose suggests that reality might not be what we think it is but because it suggests that reality is a malleable thing, like a Claymation movie, where the passing of time is the only governing principle and the only thing that won’t be negated or twisted or turned around. And what’s even stranger than this is that Piserchia doesn’t seem to do it on purpose; she doesn’t write in slipstream-like prose, and she doesn’t employ clever tricks of narration to toy with the reader’s expectations or their perception of time and space. This fable-like quality isn’t a one-off effect like Anna Kavan’s gemlike Ice—it’s who Piserchia seems to be as a writer, for better or for worse.
And there are moments when it seems to be for worse. Piserchia’s novels aren’t written in a way that you can say, once you finished, that you felt some gratification in how this or that character arc was played through. Nor are there redeeming messages of morality or philosophical questions that will be posed and possibly answered, a la Philip K. Dick. The fact is, you don’t know what the takeaways are after you've read a book by Piserchia.
And that's the beauty of it, of course: the not knowing. The uncertainty. That's what makes these unreal books seem so real, because ultimately they are as confusing and as unknowable as life itself.
April 20, 2016
Hah! Hah hah ha hah hah hah! FUNNY!!! It's slapstick science fiction and as always very engaging storytelling from Doris Piserchia.
Did I forget to mention in my other reviews of Doris Piserchia's writing how funny she is! Hilarious! I must find a collection of her short stories in one book to review because individually, many of her shorter pieces are uproarious.
First of all, the central antagonist stinks; his name is Peru, because his first victim (Peru is a virulent microorganism without an conscience. Or maybe the opposite of a conscience. Can a bacterium be a sociopath?) didn't like the smell of the oozing, infected wound which was to later absorb his brain cells and kill him. P.U.!
Humanity has long since abandoned Earth for the stars, but has left quite a legacy behind. Piserchia doesn't use much science or science fiction terminology, but here she's written about hypothetical space-ladders, the sorts which orbit geosynchronously with one end dangling down and anchored on Earth and the other swinging widely outside of orbit, so the whole thing stays balanced and up in the air. Piserchia ignores all the tech-fetish details many other authors would dwell on, in order to tell a really good story. I wish more SF authors would realize that their audiences already know most of the terms and they can go ahead and tell a story without drooling over technical terms (really just babble, for the most part, like in Star Trek.)
There is a collection of good buddies who like to rumble, like as if Godzilla and the Smog Monster, Mothra, and that three-headed critter had a sort of outer-space horseplay get-together. They are titanic and stupid and violent and strange, and more fun than just about any science fiction monsters I've ever read about. You can see ANOTHER titanic monster chasing the protagonist along a suspended fiber hanging off of a space ladder, down into the jungle of Earth's surface many millennia from now, after the world has been abandoned and all the toxic waste and illegal biological experiments have had time to create a new, more fun and exciting ecosystem. In fact, I wish it was real and I was living there, in the future. No safer and no friendlier than the world of today but even in black and white print, it's lusher and more colorful than what I have today, here in Northern California.
The protagonist is a human, returned from the stars, to scout things out for a vast program of defoliation about to begin, to reclaim Earth for humanity. Except he finds out humanity is still alive on Earth, though different. So he wants to save the world, Peru wishes to enjoy killing everything in the world, and likes the sound of starfaring-more worlds to kill.
Did I forget to mention in my other reviews of Doris Piserchia's writing how funny she is! Hilarious! I must find a collection of her short stories in one book to review because individually, many of her shorter pieces are uproarious.
First of all, the central antagonist stinks; his name is Peru, because his first victim (Peru is a virulent microorganism without an conscience. Or maybe the opposite of a conscience. Can a bacterium be a sociopath?) didn't like the smell of the oozing, infected wound which was to later absorb his brain cells and kill him. P.U.!
Humanity has long since abandoned Earth for the stars, but has left quite a legacy behind. Piserchia doesn't use much science or science fiction terminology, but here she's written about hypothetical space-ladders, the sorts which orbit geosynchronously with one end dangling down and anchored on Earth and the other swinging widely outside of orbit, so the whole thing stays balanced and up in the air. Piserchia ignores all the tech-fetish details many other authors would dwell on, in order to tell a really good story. I wish more SF authors would realize that their audiences already know most of the terms and they can go ahead and tell a story without drooling over technical terms (really just babble, for the most part, like in Star Trek.)
There is a collection of good buddies who like to rumble, like as if Godzilla and the Smog Monster, Mothra, and that three-headed critter had a sort of outer-space horseplay get-together. They are titanic and stupid and violent and strange, and more fun than just about any science fiction monsters I've ever read about. You can see ANOTHER titanic monster chasing the protagonist along a suspended fiber hanging off of a space ladder, down into the jungle of Earth's surface many millennia from now, after the world has been abandoned and all the toxic waste and illegal biological experiments have had time to create a new, more fun and exciting ecosystem. In fact, I wish it was real and I was living there, in the future. No safer and no friendlier than the world of today but even in black and white print, it's lusher and more colorful than what I have today, here in Northern California.
The protagonist is a human, returned from the stars, to scout things out for a vast program of defoliation about to begin, to reclaim Earth for humanity. Except he finds out humanity is still alive on Earth, though different. So he wants to save the world, Peru wishes to enjoy killing everything in the world, and likes the sound of starfaring-more worlds to kill.
August 8, 2016
Short, occasionally engaging story about an overgrown Earth. Sits uncomfortably between pulp and new wave with wonderful results. The descriptions of trees grown so huge as to accommodate forests, beaches and lakes are lovely but the best prose is delivered when building up huge monsters and the psychology of infectious slimes in loving, sticky detail. Piserchia clearly has an interest in imagining the inner lives of bizarre creatures which move, think and breed in alien ways. Often really disgusting ways too.
The plot is underdeveloped to the point of incoherence in places, but is buoyed by the superfluous, fairytale energy of the prose. The author brews up a heady genetic brew of alien oddities and just lets it fly in all directions, not bothering to follow any individual strand closely or to tie up loose ends but content to watch it spill over and bubble.
The plot is underdeveloped to the point of incoherence in places, but is buoyed by the superfluous, fairytale energy of the prose. The author brews up a heady genetic brew of alien oddities and just lets it fly in all directions, not bothering to follow any individual strand closely or to tie up loose ends but content to watch it spill over and bubble.
May 26, 2014
I've enjoyed reading several of Piserchia's books, but this one seemed a little rushed to me. It was never quite clear what exactly was going on and why we should care and how it all fit together. Spaceships, ecology, okay, what's with the wig? Not a terrible book, but nothing memorable, I'm afraid. It does have a nice interior illustration from H.R. van Dongen (that doesn't seem to illustrate anything fro the narrative), and an odd Wayne Barlowe cover.
March 2, 2018
A strange and wonderfully goofy book. Will definitely read more by this author.
January 31, 2026
slapdash and footloose with plenty of fun and funny ... Piserchia wrote 13 quick books in a decade overlapping the 70s and 80s before retiring abruptly and her books then lapsed into obscurity and haven't been reprinted for 50 years ... the books are now available as ebooks but if you want a real book in your hands you have to track down one of the originals ... anyway, I will take the two that I have read so far over plenty of the famous old sf reads (and the famous new sf reads too), including a good percentage of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series, for instance ... the setting of this book is kind of a funhouse mirror of a certain Brian Aldiss book but in this case the Hothouse Earth is not nearly so far gone and the malevolent mutations the humans (and/or mostly humans) encounter lead to more slapsticky scenarios ... I especially enjoyed the "conversations" the human spaceman and the earth natives had throughout the book who of course didn't know what each other was saying and yet those conversations were constantly intersecting in amusing ways ...
... though brisk fun is the name of the game, Piserchia is not adverse to sneaking in a bit of satire here and there, and refreshingly, any of the usual machismo mannerisms of the genre that threaten to occur are quickly subverted or just plain mocked ... perhaps the only sustained social satire was just a LOL chapter's worth of a way station in the overall plot line that included an encounter with a cult-like gender- and sex-phobic society:
"The creature who reproduced him/her had to be killed because looking at her/him was offensive. It made no attempt to hide the fact that it had given birth. Ugh."
"But as an animal such an act would never occur to her."
"Once we set the example we expect the populace to follow it. That doesn't include you. We know that there are other tribes with different cultural philosophies. If you were just a common person who wanted to stay and live with us you'd have to hide your body in a plant skin."
"But everyone would know I'm a man."
"We'd pretend we didn't know and eventually we would forget."
"Just like that?"
"Life is simple."
"By the way, I noticed that someone castrated him."
"We put clothes on it to hide its identity but it kept taking them off. What else was there to do? It wasn't a hasty decision. We had a meeting first."
Pip slept on this tidbit of information and decided that he would leave before they made an example out of him.
... though brisk fun is the name of the game, Piserchia is not adverse to sneaking in a bit of satire here and there, and refreshingly, any of the usual machismo mannerisms of the genre that threaten to occur are quickly subverted or just plain mocked ... perhaps the only sustained social satire was just a LOL chapter's worth of a way station in the overall plot line that included an encounter with a cult-like gender- and sex-phobic society:
"The creature who reproduced him/her had to be killed because looking at her/him was offensive. It made no attempt to hide the fact that it had given birth. Ugh."
"But as an animal such an act would never occur to her."
"Once we set the example we expect the populace to follow it. That doesn't include you. We know that there are other tribes with different cultural philosophies. If you were just a common person who wanted to stay and live with us you'd have to hide your body in a plant skin."
"But everyone would know I'm a man."
"We'd pretend we didn't know and eventually we would forget."
"Just like that?"
"Life is simple."
"By the way, I noticed that someone castrated him."
"We put clothes on it to hide its identity but it kept taking them off. What else was there to do? It wasn't a hasty decision. We had a meeting first."
Pip slept on this tidbit of information and decided that he would leave before they made an example out of him.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews