Ducornet, Rikki
Entry updated 9 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
Working name of US illustrator and author Erica Ducornet (1943- ), resident in various countries, including for a considerable time Canada, now in US; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Aunt Rose & Uncle Freidle" in Other Times for November 1975/January 1976. Included in her graphic work is a set of abstracted drawings for Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid (1981 chap); she has also illustrated some of Jorge Luis Borges's tales in English translation. As a writer whose work seems to drop in on various genres (without, as it were, knocking), she has composed some of her surrealist Fabulations (see also Postmodernism and SF) in a fashion which allows sf readings to be extracted from the mix, especially in the Alchemy Quartet – comprising The Stain (1984), emblematizing the alchemical element of Earth, Entering Fire (1986), emblematizing Fire, The Fountains of Neptune (1989), emblematizing Water, and The Jade Cabinet (1993), emblematizing Air – which engages in Alternate History and Dystopia tropes to explore four exorbitant family romances, in which Clones and other devices appear and disappear; Lewis Carroll features largely in the tale. Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) fabulates in Magic Realist fashion a parable of Evolution set on a mysterious seventeenth-century Island, described in terms evocative of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), where at least one otherwise unknown species has survived the burgeoning depredations of colonialism; Señor Fantasma, the protagonist of the tale, is a blasphemous Prospero – see William Shakespeare's The Tempest (performed 1611) – who marries his daughter. Ducornet's stories – most interestingly assembled as The Butcher's Tales (coll 1980; exp 1991; exp vt The Complete Butcher's Tales 1994) – are notable for translating the influence of, among others, Borges.
Trafik: A Novel in Warp Drive (2021) is a postmodernist riff on the Space Opera topos of the Fantastic Voyage through interstellar space in search of planets whose riches (see Imperialism; Postmodernism and SF) can be extracted; two AI members of the complement escape to the Pastoral planet Trafik, rich in parks and Libraries, where the ai known as Quiver discovers Edenic Sex (see Adam and Eve). The Plotinus (2023 chap), set in a Earth so devastated that Homo sapiens has mostly migrated elsewhere in the Solar System, traces the internal hegira of an incarcerated reject. [JC]
Erica DeGré Ducornet
born Canton, New York: 19 April 1943
works (selected)
series
Alchemy Quartet
- The Stain (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984) [Alchemy Quartet: hb/Guy Ducornet]
- Entering Fire (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986) [Alchemy Quartet: hb/Guy Ducornet]
- The Fountains of Neptune (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart, 1989) [Alchemy Quartet: hb/T M Craan]
- The Jade Cabinet (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993) [Alchemy Quartet: hb/Rosamond Wolff Purcell]
individual titles
- Phosphor in Dreamland (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995) [pb/Rosamond Wolff Purcell]
- Gazelle (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2003) [hb/from Gerald Leslie Brockhurst]
- Trafik: A Novel in Warp Drive (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2021) [pb/Sarah Evenson]
- The Plotinus (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2023) [chap: illus/Michael Eastman: pb/Sarah Evenson]
collections and stories
- The Butcher's Tales (Toronto, Ontario: Aya Press, 1980) [coll: chap: hb/Tony Urquhart]
- The Butcher's Tales (London: Atlas Press, 1991) [coll: exp of the above: pb/]
- The Complete Butcher's Tales (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994) [exp vt of the above: hb/Rosamond Wolff Purcell]
- The Butcher's Tales (London: Atlas Press, 1991) [coll: exp of the above: pb/]
- The Word "Desire" (New York: Henry Holt, 1997) [coll: hb/Rosamond Purcell]
- The One Marvelous Thing (Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008) [coll: illus/pb/T Motley]
nonfiction
- The Monstrous and the Marvelous (San Francisco, California: City Lights Publishers, 1999) [nonfiction: pb/]
about the author
- G N Forester and M J Nicholls, editors. Verbivoracious Press Festschrift Volume 4: Rikki Ducornet (Singapore: Verbivoracious Press, 2015) [nonfiction: anth: in the publisher's Verbivoracious Press Festschrift series: hb/nonpictorial]
links
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