Star Rider by Doris Piserchia
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Science Fiction at 12:00 on 8 July 2017
Women’s Press, 1987, 221 p. Another I didn’t catch up with at the time of publication.
In Star Rider humans have differentiated into different strains, jaks and dreens. Narrator Lone, or Jade as she becomes, is a Jakalowar (jak.) Along with her dog-ancestried mount Hinx she can teleport easily across space. This is an ability which seems to be mixed in with a sort of telepathy/awareness called jink. All jaks are searching for the lost planet of Doubleluck, finding which would make their fortune. Jade is dogged by Big Jak, who knows where Doubleluck is and wishes to stop her finding it. He traps her but they are attacked by dreens and Jade is imprisoned, without Hinx, on a planet called Gibraltar. Separation from a mount normally makes a jak go mad but Jade manages to stay sane. This middle part of the novel is tonally somewhat at odds with what came before and what is to come. Eventually Jade persuades a dreen mount to let her jink, escapes, finds Hinx again and heads for old Earth where she uncovers Doubleluck inside a mountain. She is chased there by the dreens, whose leader Rulon wants to force her into marriage but who are eventually overcome in a sort of space battle and Jade then reveals to the victorious jaks her ability to jink to other galaxies, a jak goal for millennia.
The twists and turns of the story don’t seem to follow much logic and the text is occasionally embellished with unusual syntax which either I got used to as the novel progressed or, more likely given my attention to the minutiae of text, Piserchia tended to forget about. Neither are the characters very memorable; Piserchia’s focus is more on ongoing plot, with the occasional feminist aside. I would hazard Star Rider is not among the best SF from the 1970s.
Pedant’s corner:- sat (seated, x2.) “As for us humans, we looked at the ground” (I agree “as for us” is the normal phrase but“humans” is the subject of that sentence so it should be “we” humans,) “had showed him” (shown.) “Matbe everything in it was a predator, which meant that everything in it was also a prey,” (not “a” prey, just prey,) grill (grille – is grill a US spelling for this?) “Was sewed up” (sewn,) a missing full stop, abolishment (abolition,) “he removed ten appendixes” (the plural of appendix is appendices,) “there were plenty of game and plant life” (there was plenty,) laid down (lay down.)
