Doris Piserchia e-books; Doomtime reviewed

Doomtime_DAW_1981Doomtime_Gateway_2012

Left: Doris Piserchia, Doomtime paperback cover (DAW books, 1981)
Right: E-book cover for the same book (Gateway books, 2012)

Much of the writing about science fiction writer Doris Piserchia laments her disappearance from publishing in the mid '80s and the subsequent, unjust lack of interest in reprinting her thirteen novels: brilliant and rather eccentric imaginative tales appearing between 1973 and 1983, graced with pulp covers (see above left). SF critic John Clute classified Piserchia as a "new wave" writer, which would put her in the august company of Delany, LeGuin, Aldiss, et al, although she worked in several genres (subversively).

Now, at last, six of her novels have been published as e-books by Gateway, a subsidiary of Hachette UK, with more promised to come soon. Still classed as science fiction, but we take our gains as they come.
In case you're wondering what's up with that orange-haired man, that's Creed, denizen of a far future Earth where humans are bit players in a struggle between two malevolent, Everest-sized trees. The roots and shoots of Tedron and Krake (as they are known) straddle the entire globe, and fight like slowly-writhing snakes in areas of contested geography. An Amazon reader review details some of the bizarre qualities of the world in Doomtime:

...fungus creatures which meld with humans, strange fungus pools that unravel people's psyches, humans sucked dry by Tedron and Krake, humans mutated beyond recognition by the trees, humans turning into trees, fuzzy smallish fungus which grow around peoples' necks, addicted humans stuck in hibernating trees desperate to meld...

The most disturbing element of this novel is how little the humans have control over their situation. Entire groups of humans are transformed by these trees: humans are in no way the superior lifeforms. Piserchia is the master at showing instead of telling, often in an offhand matter of fact way which intensifies the dread and unease. This has to be one of the more unusual and disturbing worlds I've ever read about.

The book has a quality of lucid dreaming but always with a sense of structure and purpose.
As we kill off species and muck about in the gene pool it's not impossible to imagine a future Earth where nature shifts the balance and humans bow to sentient super-colony organisms, a la Kudzu vines run amuck. But environmental jeremiad lies more or less in the background here; Piserchia ponders what people will be like in this changed world and it's mostly an ignoble bunch: addicts and vainglorious asses stumbling around in a fog of hallucinatory confusion. Creed is our POV character who gradually gets a clue and starts considering what can be done about the trees, using bits of super-powered "old tech" left around the landscape by his remote ancestors. That's a classic genre hook but it's those imaginative details told in an offhand tone that make this "lit."

"Tiny Horns," "Drone College"

electribe rmkii

"Tiny Horns" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]

"Drone College" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

Have been using the Octatrack sequencer to sample other gear: in this case the Korg Electribe rhythm synth above is MIDI-slaved to the Octatrack, which records several bars of audio when you hit "play." Then other sounds can be added on top of those beats. As recording fodder, I am using some of the Korg preset patterns, cutting out what I don't like and rewriting some of those beats. Once recorded, it's much easier to string together a song in the OT than it is in the Electribe itself, owing to a more generous display and better programming.
Why use the Electribe at all? For an inexpensive box it has a wealth of interesting, knob-tweakable, analog-modeling DSP sounds.

arthackday provisos

Art Hack Day event today at Bushwick's 319 Scholes comes heralded with utopian technocratic newspeak:

Art Hack Day is an internet-based nonprofit dedicated to hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is tech. We bridge the gap between art, technology and entrepreneurship with grassroots hackathons that demonstrate the expressive potential of new technology and the power of radical collaboration in art. We believe in non-utilitarian beauty through technology and its ability to affect social change for public good.

Fine, but let's also consider:
(i) art putting tech in its place
(ii) indifference to startups and their incredible journeys
(iii) skepticism about allegiance to vague notions of "public good."

.svg animation test

pac_test_screenshot

screenshot of .svg animation at 499 x 438 pixels

Following up on a post here titled "After Animated GIFs, What?" (and see also). I got an email from pac-n-zoom which has been working on web-based animation using .svg files (vector-based, essentially an open-source version of Flash). I made a test animation and if (but only if) you are using Firefox you can see the results here.
Down-sides to this so far in comparison to GIFs: (i) not enough browsers support it, (ii) the larger the file size the bigger the CPU hit, (iii) lack of tools to make .svg files.
Up-side: (i) open source, no-plugin-required animation (although pac-n-zoom will charge to convert raster to vector once they're out of beta), (ii) animation stays crisp and detailed as scale is changed, unlike GIFs, which fuzz out on most modern browsers. (because of)

(Also, for what it's worth, the WordPress software wouldn't let me load an .svg as an image, due to "security concerns." Had to use FTP.)

Update/clarification: I posted the .svg on a separate page because I knew some browsers wouldn't read it and didn't want an ugly [X] or what have you in place of an image on the main blog page. Not being able to upload the .svg in WordPress was a separate issue. It's not that WordPress wouldn't let me post the .svg, it's that I couldn't use its built-in image uploader to put it up on the site -- I had to use FTP. Here is the .svg at 100 x 100 pixels. Am told this will work in Chrome as well as Firefox (thanks timb); I knew IE just shows the image un-animated. Not sure about Safari or other browsers.

svg animation test

Update 2: Viewable in Safari, per asdf (thanks)