The early 21st-century setting might, in the hands of another author, be only a guise, a shortcut to making a world that's more gritty, shabby, and used up than ours. But Disch's future is thoroughly imagined, and he's adept at dropping in details of his characters' lives that are commonplace to them but jarring to us. It might be something as simple as going to the kitchen to "mix up a glass of milk." Occasionally it's radical, as in the case of Millie, who wants to have a baby but also keep her career. The answer? The child is gestated in an artificial womb and Millie's husband gets mammary implants.
Though American, Disch is closely associated with the UK's New Wave movement, and these stories reflect the New Wave emphasis on character above ideas. He's also a well-known poet, and in 334 you'll find some of the most lyrical science fiction written. --Brooks Peck
]]>For example, if you ever wanted to know why L. Ron Hubbard managed to start a cult but Philip K. Dick didn't, Disch is your man. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, Disch elaborates a vision of science fiction as one of the twentieth century's most influential manifestations of America as a culture of liars. Among the frauds are the alien abduction stories of Whitley Strieber, the sadomasochistic dominance fantasies of John Norman, and the co-opting of cyberpunk by postmodern academics and avant-gardists trying to stay hip.
Disch plays very few favorites, and when ideology gets in the way of good writing, it doesn't matter what side you're on. Subliterary feminist fantasies of matriarchial utopias get slammed just as hard as subliterary conservative militaristic wet dreams. Not even one of sci-fi's most beloved Grand Masters, Robert Heinlein, is unimpeachable; Disch correctly nails Heinlein on his consistent sexism and racism, as well as his gradual descent into solipsism. One of Heinlein's last novels, The Number of the Beast, is described as "the freakout to which [Heinlein]'s entitled as a good American, whose right to lie is protected by the Constitution."
What does Disch like? For starters: Philip K. Dick, the British New Wave as exemplified by J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and Joe Haldeman's Hugo- and Nebula-winning The Forever War, described as being "to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II," and which he believes deserved a Pulitzer as well.
Disch may confirm your suspicions, or he may raise every last one of your hackles. But one thing this book will definitely not do is bore you.
]]>Then Bob's wife came back from the grave. She brought her sadness, her rage, and something worse - her mother.
Revenge is a gruesome business. And Bob has hell to pay...
]]>It may sound pretty confusing, but you'll find yourself thoroughly caught up in Thomas M. Disch's bizarre, satirical story of life, love, and death in the supernatural Midwest. --Craig Engler
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A critically acclaimed novelist and erstwhile frontrunner of the new wave of science fiction writers who transformed that genre, Tom Disch here returns to his first love: poetry.
Lyric, narrative, sagacious, satirical, uncompromising, and honest, he stands outside poetry's mainstream. Often linked with the New Formalists and the New York school, he is altogether too idiosyncratic and various a poet to be so easily categorized. Disch's mordant humor is everywhere in evidence in these poems of his forties and fifties: poems by turns playful, profound, fantastic, funny, and formally dextrous.
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