Spaceling

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 show more 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. show less

This is one of my all-time favorite SF from the 70s. I read it as a young teen, the SF Book Club edition, and when that fell apart I found the paperback (still love the Book Club cover the most though)

Doris liked the idea of doing futuristic SF with a variant human strain genetically different through unspecified causes. In this book, some humans can see rings that float through the air, and some cannot. Of the rings that float around, they are randomly sized, differently shaded, and singular occurances that just drift haphazardly around the world. Most people who are actually able to see the rings can only see single rings of two colors. The protagonist, an orphan, is able to see myriad colors, and even double rings. On top of that, show more she can control the direction of the rings. For people who can see the rings, they can jump into them and appear in alternate dimensions, one a world filled with lava, and the other a waterworld.

The world-building itself is amazingly fun, but on top of that there are quirky weird characters, alternate dimension murders, a mystery surrounding a set of brilliant researchers and scientists who disappeared, and the question of what ever happened to the orphan's parents. It's fast paced, drops you literally right into the action from the first page, and rushes through the story just like one of its lava floes. It does have an ending, but I would say that is the only detraction from my love of this story - it was a little abrupt and I wanted to know more.

At the time, this size of book was about par for authors of SF. There's not a whole lot of room for filler, but that is okay, as it really keeps the story moving! show less

It's more fantasy than SF, although it holds together well, and given the time it was written, has managed to age well. I think I had to read the first chapter or so over, because there was so much going on, but it was just fun from then on. I have at least one other book by this author, and look forward to reading it.

There's a lot going on in the story, and there's another review of the book that expresses some of the more interesting items. I'll probably read it again, at least once, just for the joy of it.

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.