DISCH, Thomas M(ichael)

(1940-)

   US writer, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he has subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and Mexico. He began publishing sf with "The Double-Timer" for Fantastic in 1962; much of his early work appears in One Hundred and Two H Bombs (coll 1966 UK; with 2 stories omitted and 2 added 1971 USA; with those 2 new stories omitted along with 2 previous stories, and 7 new stories added vt White Fang Goes Dingo and Other Funny SF Stories 1971 UK). "White Fang Goes Dingo", which appears only in the first and third versions of the collection, soon became TMD's second (and rather minor) novel, Mankind Under the Leash (1965 Worlds of If as "White Fang Goes Dingo"; exp 1966 dos; vt The Puppies of Terra 1978 UK); in it ALIENS take over Earth and make pets of mankind for aesthetic reasons. The hero, White Fang, eventually drives the aliens off, but his feelings towards his period of effortless slavery as a dancing pet remain ambivalent. The first version of One Hundred and Two H Bombs, plus one of the stories added to the second edition, plus Mankind Under the Leash under its vt The Puppies of Terra, all appear in The Early Science Fiction Stories of Thomas M. Disch (coll 1977) ed David G. HARTWELL.TMD's first novel, The Genocides (1965), his most formidable early work, also involves alien manipulation of Earth from a perspective indifferent (this time chillingly) to any human values or priorities or conventions of storytelling; this sense of the indifference of society or the Universe pervades his work, helping to distinguish it from US sf in general, which remained fundamentally optimistic about the relevance of human values through the 1960s. In The Genocides the aliens seed Earth with enormous plants, in effect transforming the planet into a monoculture agribusiness, an environment in which it gradually becomes impossible for humans to survive. When groups attempt to fight back, the aliens treat them as vermin, worms in the apple of the planet; and, in one of the most chilling conclusions to any sf novel published in the USA, fumigate them.Echo Round his Bones (1967) - later assembled with The Genocides and Mankind Under the Leash as Triplicity (omni 1980) - is another minor work, but CAMP CONCENTRATION (1967 NW; 1968 UK) is TMD's most sustained sf invention, and represents the highwater mark of his involvement with the UK NEW WAVE (he was one of several Americans, including John T. SLADEK, to be strongly associated with UK rather than US sf in the late 1960s). Told entirely in journal form, CAMP CONCENTRATION recounts its narrator's experiences as an inmate in a NEAR FUTURE US concentration camp where the military has treated him with Pallidine, a wonder drug which heightens human INTELLIGENCE but causes death within months. Along with his fellow-inmates, the narrator understands he is being used as a kind of self-destructing think tank, experiencing the ecstasy of enhanced intelligence and the agonies of "retribution" - the analogies with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947 Sweden; trans 1948 US) are explicit - but his death is averted by a trope-quoting sf climax which has been sharply criticized as a begging of the issues raised.The next books were less weighty. Black Alice (1968) with Sladek, writing together as Thom DEMIJOHN, though not sf is reminiscent of both writers. The Prisoner * (1969) is a tie to the tv series The PRISONER . Much of TMD's best work in the years around CAMP CONCENTRATION is in shorter forms, most of the stories being assembled in Under Compulsion (coll 1968 UK; vt Fun with Your New Head 1971 US) and Getting into Death (coll 1973 UK), a title superseded by the superior US edition, Getting into Death and Other Stories (coll 1976), which deletes 5 stories and adds 4. TMD's most famous single story, "The Asian Shore" (1970), which appears in both versions of the collection, renders with gripping verisimilitude the transmutation of a bourgeois Western man into a lower-class urban Turk with family, through a process of possession. Other notable stories from this period include "The Master of the Milford Altarpiece" (1968), "Displaying the Flag" (1973) and "The Jocelyn Shrager Story" (1975). Increasingly, during the 1970s, TMD's best work made use of sf components (if at all) as background to stories of character; in much of this work his protagonists are directly involved, whether or not successfully, in the making of ART, and he increasingly devoted himself to studies of the nature of the artist and of the world s/he attempts to mould but which generally, crushingly, moulds her/him. From this period date his first volumes of poetry (he writes much of his POETRY as "Tom Disch"), the contents of which evince a sharp speculative clarity whose roots are almost certainly generic. After Highway Sandwiches (coll 1970 chap), with Marilyn Hacker (1942-) and Charles PLATT, and The Best Way to Figure Plumbing (coll 1972), further work appeared in ABCDEFG HIJKLM NPOQRST UVWXYZ (coll 1981 chap UK) (the ordering NPOQRST being sic), Burn This (coll 1982 chap UK), Here I Am, There You Are, Where Were We? (coll 1984 chap UK), Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems (coll 1989), and Dark Verses and Light (coll 1991). Tom Disch is for many readers primarily a poet whose connection with sf, if known, seems secondary.TMD's most enduring single work of the 1970s is, however, sf. 334 (coll of linked stories 1972 UK), possibly his best book, is set in a near-future Manhattan; the stories, whose linkings are so subtle and elaborate that it is possible - and probably desirable - to read the book as a novel, pivot about the apartment building whose address (334 East 11th Street) is the title of the book (the numbers 3,3,4 also serve as an arithmetical base [OULIPO] for the design and proportions of the text). 334 comprises a social portrait of urban life in about AD2025 in a New York where existence has become even more difficult, intense and straitened than it is now, and where the authorities treat humans no better than TMD's aliens do; but the essence of the book lies in the patterns of survival achieved by its numerous characters, whose aspirations and successes and failures in this darkened urban world do not step over the bounds of what we may expect will become normal experience. ON WINGS OF SONG (1979 UK) is likewise set mainly in a near-future New York, and thematically sums up most of the abiding concerns of TMD's career, as well as presenting an exemplary portrait of the pleasures and miseries of art in a world made barbarous by material scarcities and spiritual lassitude; in the final analysis, however, it lacks the complex, energetic denseness of the earlier book.By this point, he had in any case begun significantly to lessen his production of sf. Neither his massive Gothic novel Clara Reeve (1975) as by Leonie Hargrave - earlier, with Sladek, he had collaborated on a more routine Gothic, The House that Fear Built (1966), the two writing together as Cassandra Knye - nor Neighboring Lives (1981) with Charles Naylor (1941-), an historical analysis in fictional terms of mid-19th-century English literary life, has any genre content. There followed two collections of literate but significantly less engaged genre work - FUNDAMENTAL DISCH (coll 1980; cut 1981 UK) and The Man who Had No Idea (coll 1982 UK) - as well as The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), an intricately metaphysical horror novel. Its thematic partners - The MD: A Horror Story (1991), a massive and ambitious exercise in the supernatural whose conclusion takes place in a complexly devastated near future; and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994 UK), which savagely satirizes the sexual hypocrises and obsessions of the modern Roman Catholic Church through a plot involving pedophilia and doppelgangers - mark only a partial return to the instrumental sf of his early work; however, as a requiem for and an ethical indictment of the US this century, it is as punishing as any of the more conspicuously radical works from the beginning of his career. Amnesia (written and programed 1986) is an engaging piece of interactive software. He is the author of two plays, Ben Hur (produced 1989) and The Cardinal Detoxes (produced 1990; 1993 chap), the latter being the subject of a controversy instigated by the Roman Catholic Church. TMD has been theatre critic for The Nation for several years, with an intermission in 1991-2.His virtual departure from sf may be not unconnected to the nature of the field's response to him. Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distanced mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, TMD has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers. He received the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD for ON WINGS OF SONG in 1980, but has otherwise gone relatively unhonoured by a field normally over-generous with its kudos.

   JC

   Other works: Alfred the Great * (1969) as by Victor Hastings, an associational film tie; Orders of the Retina (coll 1982 chap), poetry; Ringtime: A Story (1983 chap); Torturing Mr Amberwell (1985 chap); The Tale of Dan de Lion (1986 chap), a tale in verse; The Brave Little Toaster (1981 Fantasy Annual IV; 1986 chap) and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1988 chap), juveniles; The Silver Pillow: A Tale of Witchcraft (dated 1987 but 1988).As Editor: A series of incisive theme anthologies of unusually high calibre, comprising The Ruins of Earth (anth 1973), Bad Moon Rising (original anth 1973) and The New Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian Science Fiction (anth 1975); two additional anthologies with Charles Naylor, New Constellations (anth 1976) and Strangeness (anth 1977).

   About the author: The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme (1978) by Samuel R. DELANY; A Tom Disch Checklist: Notes Toward a Bibliography (1983 chap) by Chris DRUMM.

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISASTER; DYSTOPIAS; END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; HORROR IN SF; HUMOUR; INVASION; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; NEW WORLDS; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OVERPOPULATION; PHILIP K. DICK AWARD; POLLUTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SEX; SUPERMAN; UTOPIAS; VENUS.