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49th out of 103 books
—
5 voters
Fun with Your New Head
Contents:
The Roaches (1965)
Come to Venus Melancholy (1965)
Linda and Daniel and Spike (1967)
Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit (1968)
Descending (1964)
Nada (1964)
Now Is Forever (1964)
The Contest (1967)
The Empty Room (1967)
The Squirrel Cage (1966)
The Number You Have Reached (1967)
1-A (1968)
Fun with Your New Head (1966)
The City of Penetrating Light (1968)
Moondust, the Smel...more
The Roaches (1965)
Come to Venus Melancholy (1965)
Linda and Daniel and Spike (1967)
Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit (1968)
Descending (1964)
Nada (1964)
Now Is Forever (1964)
The Contest (1967)
The Empty Room (1967)
The Squirrel Cage (1966)
The Number You Have Reached (1967)
1-A (1968)
Fun with Your New Head (1966)
The City of Penetrating Light (1968)
Moondust, the Smel...more
Paperback, #T4913, 176 pages
Published
February 1972
by Signet/New American Library
(first published 1968)
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Excellent short story collection from the great Thomas Disch. The star is Descending... a simple but very powerful morality play, perfectly executed. Suppose you weren't paying attention when taking the down escalator at a department store, and suddenly realized that you were way lower than the basement? And that there was no up escalator in sight?
This collection is nothing near the quality of Camp Concentration, but does show some of the budding promise of this New Wave speculative writer. Overall, none of the stories in this collection really stand out in comparison to today's speculative fiction envelope pushers, but for their time the stories were likely a little more edgy. At least Disch manages to deal with more inner-space than outer-space, exploring the psychological aspects of speculative fiction more than the technobable popular...more
The late, great, Thomas Disch was probably the oddest SF author I ever knew. He didn't LOOK like an author, but more like the leader of a Hell's Angels biker gang. And yes, he was a biker. But the man did two things that really made you stop and say, "WTF?"
He wrote damned good SF stories...
And some of the most sensitive poetry I've ever heard.
This was a collection of short stories he'd written. They are funny, but with a dark twist to them. One is a story about why you should never EVER get on...more
He wrote damned good SF stories...
And some of the most sensitive poetry I've ever heard.
This was a collection of short stories he'd written. They are funny, but with a dark twist to them. One is a story about why you should never EVER get on...more
In the scope of the SF New Wave, Disch's work had a more absurdist, humanistic slant than most of his peers, and while some of his stories are playful, many of them contain a dark core, exposing the frailties of the poor and the insane, the maligned and the forgotten. The work in this early collection strays off into such themes, while not so much rooted in SF as it is in the horror genre. The most memorable stories in the collection:
'The Roaches' - living in New York City can be quite awful fo...more
'The Roaches' - living in New York City can be quite awful fo...more
The year is 1964...
J.G.Ballard: Say, Tom, me lad! Hold up there! And what is it you're working on?
Thomas Disch: Oh, just a thing. A little story about economic collapse in the future, the 1990's, and roving bands of anarchic teenagers. Tossed in a cuckolded cloned banker who is repeating existence on an infinite loop. Called "Now is Forever." Hey, where you going?
J.G.Ballard: Tea! Yes, rather. Tea.
The year is 1966...
Philip K. Dick: Hey, Tom. Man. Pull up a chair. Want some...some dope? Okay. Coo...more
J.G.Ballard: Say, Tom, me lad! Hold up there! And what is it you're working on?
Thomas Disch: Oh, just a thing. A little story about economic collapse in the future, the 1990's, and roving bands of anarchic teenagers. Tossed in a cuckolded cloned banker who is repeating existence on an infinite loop. Called "Now is Forever." Hey, where you going?
J.G.Ballard: Tea! Yes, rather. Tea.
The year is 1966...
Philip K. Dick: Hey, Tom. Man. Pull up a chair. Want some...some dope? Okay. Coo...more
Disch is terrific short story writer. Sometimes these are close to the macabre parables and tales of Poe and Kafka and other times are strangely poetic sui generis sci fi. There is a bit of reliance on trick endings but the craft is so good I wasn’t bothered.
I read this as a kid, it was my mom's. There was one story in particular that has stuck with me all these years (probably close to 30!!!) and for that this remains one of my favorite story collections, essentially for one story.
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Poet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genu...more
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Feb 07, 2009 01:33am
Feb 07, 2009 01:55am