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Camp Concentration
Louis Sacchetti is a poet and pacifist imprisoned for refusing to enlist in the war against Third World guerillas. Sacchetti and the other inmates are used in perverse scientific experiments, and Sacchetti is infected with a germ that raises intelligence to incredible heights while causing decay and death.
Paperback, 192 pages
Published
April 27th 1999
by Vintage
(first published April 1968)
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(showing 1-30)
Flowers for Algernon has become a minor classic, and, thanks to the movie, even people who haven't read it often know the story. Poor Charlie Gordon is given an operation which turns him from a mentally subnormal dishwasher into a genius, but the treatment turns out to be flawed. It's a great weepie, and I am one of many people who love it.
Camp Concentration is Algernon's evil twin. It's exploring the same basic theme, but I doubt it will ever be as well known. That doesn't necessarily mean it's ...more
Camp Concentration is Algernon's evil twin. It's exploring the same basic theme, but I doubt it will ever be as well known. That doesn't necessarily mean it's ...more
This book didn't grab me straight away -- it isn't like contemporary novels aimed at a wide popular audience, where the first sentence is a hook, or the author begins in the middle of an action scene to get the reader caught up. Disch doesn't show his hand, or even his prose, right away. But once he has lulled you into complacency and snuck up on you, oh man. Great writing.
Here is a helpful list of a few words you may not use every day:
nystigmatic: subject to involuntary eye movement.
tappet: a ...more
Here is a helpful list of a few words you may not use every day:
nystigmatic: subject to involuntary eye movement.
tappet: a ...more
In this alternate America, the country didn't stop with Vietnam. It declared war on the world. Scientists work on creating and perfecting the latest in weapons and germ warfare. When Louis Sacchetti, a poet and war protestor, is moved from his prison to a secret underground camp called Camp Archimedes, he is at first bemused and impressed by the good food yet wary. The director of the camp, General Humphrey Haast - or "HH" as Sacchetti calls him - has had Louis brought there in order for him to
...more
What should be shocking instead arouses a curiosity. Camp Concentration details a government experiment where prisoners are injected with a compound which makes them progressively hyper intelligent before the syphilis component in the injection leads them to madness and death. A poet who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector to the forever war is asked to chronicle the process. The inmates stage a play Faustus (by Kit Marlow) and the poet pens a play Auschwitz: a comedy. The whole ente
...more
WARNING: This review contains vulgarity. Just so you know. Thanks.
"Well, you read it. How'd it go?"
"Well."
"Three stars well?"
"Yep."
"Only three."
"For now."
"Because ...?"
"Because I am going to have to read this again. That middle section of Sacchetti's ramblings needs to be dissected. I need more time with that portion, and I need to read the whole thing again at a time when I can focus on it and only it."
"So you're three stars is kind of bullshit?"
"Yeah. Kind of. But I can't give it anything else ...more
"Well, you read it. How'd it go?"
"Well."
"Three stars well?"
"Yep."
"Only three."
"For now."
"Because ...?"
"Because I am going to have to read this again. That middle section of Sacchetti's ramblings needs to be dissected. I need more time with that portion, and I need to read the whole thing again at a time when I can focus on it and only it."
"So you're three stars is kind of bullshit?"
"Yeah. Kind of. But I can't give it anything else ...more
This was published in 1968 and it feels like something written at least a decade or two later. I am rather surprised by how much this book is sticking with me. I finished today but I dreamt about it last night. It was the first thing I thought of when I awoke this morning. I wish more people knew of this book. I find it hard to believe that so few, at least here on Goodreads, have read this.
As other reviews have mentioned, this book is not perfect. I would rate 4 stars if considering that but I ...more
As other reviews have mentioned, this book is not perfect. I would rate 4 stars if considering that but I ...more
If Philip K Dick had written "Flowers for Algernon", it would have come out like this.
This book was incredible, no doubt about it. I'm honestly surprised that it isn't more well-known; it was insightful, deep and thought-provoking, while still offering vivid characters, imagery, vocabulary and scenery. It was very depressing and morbid, but still a fantastic and chillingly interesting book to read through.
Someone has something insightful to say about venereal disease and philosophy of mind and his name isn't David Cronenberg! Saints be praised!
Seriously though this will leave you starved for science fiction written by a WRITER as opposed to a thinker or a schemer.
Seriously though this will leave you starved for science fiction written by a WRITER as opposed to a thinker or a schemer.
Dec 12, 2012
notgettingenough
rated it
it was ok
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
science-fiction,
pairs
Camp Concentration by Disch and Otto by Tom Ungerer
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
A pair made in a sort of hell, I guess, birthday books read back to back.
I don’t understand why Otto is badly written, when the author is obviously capable of writing good text in English. If you want to write some sort of nightmare for children – even worse, a nightmare that really happened – one has to be very careful, I imagine and this isn’t. It uses badly cliched English that is inappropriate for any ...more
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
A pair made in a sort of hell, I guess, birthday books read back to back.
I don’t understand why Otto is badly written, when the author is obviously capable of writing good text in English. If you want to write some sort of nightmare for children – even worse, a nightmare that really happened – one has to be very careful, I imagine and this isn’t. It uses badly cliched English that is inappropriate for any ...more
I find that it isn't easy to run across books by Thomas Disch, he's a fairly obscure pulp scifi author. After reading two of his books, I understand why he's both critically acclaimed in reviews but not a common find in the bookstore. The mechanics of his writing obscure the overall story and tend to create a slog for the reader. The other Disch book I have read to date is "Puppies of Terra". Both books have a very inventive plots and a few solid characters but appear to act as a soapbox for Dis
...more
Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, published in 1967, is the most erudite work of speculative fiction I've ever read, beating out even the various books and short stories that I've read by Gene Wolfe. The book's narrator, you see, is a poet, and he casually deploys scores of allusions, some of which I recognized and others I couldn't follow. Disch is the only writer besides David Bentley Hart that I've seen use the word “chthonic,” which is, along with “phthisic,” one of my favorite words that s
...more
I am, perhaps, prejudiced (and maybe still in shock). Tom was a friend. I am glad I didn't read his SF, though, while he was still around: I would have proved a blathering fanboy and an unworthwhile conversationalist.
I have encountered many writers who possess the twisted, wild skills of imagination germane to speculative fiction, but I have rarely seen them execute their visions with such facility. Tom's prose is knife sharp, and allusions to Dante, Marlowe, Rilke, Goethe, et al. abound (they h ...more
I have encountered many writers who possess the twisted, wild skills of imagination germane to speculative fiction, but I have rarely seen them execute their visions with such facility. Tom's prose is knife sharp, and allusions to Dante, Marlowe, Rilke, Goethe, et al. abound (they h ...more
‘Camp Concentration’ reads to me as a novel very much of its time. It was first published in 1968 and is set in a near future that is now decades past. The narrator is a conscientious objector to America’s latest war in Asia, this one apparently including the use of tactical nukes in Malaysia. After an initial period in a normal prison sharing a cell with criminals, he is transferred to a mysterious underground base. There, he learns that the other prisoners are being experimented on and is aske
...more
I like sf books that take place in the present day, or rather, the present day of their composition. Camp Concentration was published in 1972. An expanded version of the Vietnam War seems to be underway. Robert MacNamara is mentioned frequently, and Disch assumes that his readers will know what Dwight Eisenhower looked like.
Sachetti is a jailed conscientious objector, a "conchie" who finds himself transferred from a federal prison to the luxurious Camp Archimedes. HIs new digs are spacious and ...more
Sachetti is a jailed conscientious objector, a "conchie" who finds himself transferred from a federal prison to the luxurious Camp Archimedes. HIs new digs are spacious and ...more
'Campo de concentración' es una novela distópica publicada en 1968 por Thomas M. Disch, uno de los abanderados de la new wave americana; o lo que es lo mismo, esa ciencia ficción apartada de los elementos que la habían caracterizado hasta ese momento, es decir, la aventura, y centrándose en argumentos más adultos y serios.
La historia está narrada por Louis Sacchetti, un poeta que se ha negado a alistarse y por ello ha sido encarcelado. Y es que los Estados Unidos están en guerra con casi todo el ...more
La historia está narrada por Louis Sacchetti, un poeta que se ha negado a alistarse y por ello ha sido encarcelado. Y es que los Estados Unidos están en guerra con casi todo el ...more
“Beauty,” he said solemnly, “is nothing but the beginning of a terror that we are able barely to endure.” And with those words George Wagner heaved the entirety of a considerable breakfast into that pure, Euclidean space.
It’s hard to put into words why these two sentences filled me with despair reading this book, but let me try. First, Disch has a mentally ill man quoting Rilke. If that wasn’t a cliche then, it certainly is now. Second, I really can’t believe that Louis, the narrator and throu ...more
It’s hard to put into words why these two sentences filled me with despair reading this book, but let me try. First, Disch has a mentally ill man quoting Rilke. If that wasn’t a cliche then, it certainly is now. Second, I really can’t believe that Louis, the narrator and throu ...more
“In summary: I like this book, and I think anybody who likes books about painters and devils would like it too.”(pg.83). Some of the sixties new wave leaves me cold (Sorry Chip Delaney this means you), but when it’s on, some of the best literature of the era came out of it. This starts out like Kafka rewriting Flowers of Algernon with hints of the Prisoner (which Disch wrote a novel for) before becoming a surreal dreamscape and then winding into an ,I thought, satisfying twist. Wonderfully macab
...more
Freaky sci fi book. Government prisoners in a secret camp are given a drug derived from syphilis. They die from it, but on the way become geniuses. Scary. Intense.
The most notable thing about the dystopic view of an alternative America in Thomas Disch's novel is the status of the narrator. This topic is important to me in part because of my familiarity with Vladimir Nabokov's postmodern novel Pale Fire for which the issue is paramount, but while thinking about that book my view of the status of other narratives was called into question. I mention this because Camp Concentration is told in the first person as the journal of Louis Sacchetti, poet and draft
...more
Thomas Disch was never as fashionable (for want of a better word) within the science fiction community as he deserved, and at the time of first publication Camp Concentration was perhaps (to take a very long view of things) outplayed by Daniel Keyes’s slightly more reader-friendly novel Flowers for Algernon which had been published some months earlier, explores the same theme of artificially enhanced intelligence, is hard-hitting in its own way but then is also, undeniably, outstripped by Disch’
...more
I read this one twice before: once in my teens, one in my twenties where I finally got all the allusions and vocabulary, and "today" after having lent it to a friend who raved about it. I remember almost nothing about the turns and twists of the plot, just the basic premise. Let's see how it holds up.
Pretty well, actually. There's some question how much the author is faithfully writing from the point of view of a self-indulgent literary figure and how much the author is actually indulging in bei ...more
Pretty well, actually. There's some question how much the author is faithfully writing from the point of view of a self-indulgent literary figure and how much the author is actually indulging in bei ...more
I suspect people will think I give this "only" 3 stars because I don't like Disch's "strong language" that he uses against the Establishment. I admit - I do not adore the snarling vitriolic writing from a number of authors.
But I grew up reading Nietzsche and Voltaire and Sade and since have read Celine and bits of Burroughs. Now it just seems rabid, not shocking.
When Disch is on - the prose is erudite and succinct, making the work great. When Disch is off - it just turns into nonsense, drivel, a ...more
But I grew up reading Nietzsche and Voltaire and Sade and since have read Celine and bits of Burroughs. Now it just seems rabid, not shocking.
When Disch is on - the prose is erudite and succinct, making the work great. When Disch is off - it just turns into nonsense, drivel, a ...more
Another interesting SF premise - super geniuses created by the military via a fast acting and deadly disease agent. Much like any work including geniuses, the author has to try really hard to make them "sound smart." Usually, as is the case here, this entails sesquipedalian writing and references to obscure 16th century Croatian poets. Also an odd, somewhat contrived, ending doesn't serve the book well.
I have the sense that if I had read Faust (both Marlowe's and Goethe's) and re-read Aquinas prior to tackling this, I would have appreciated it still more. The dark satire was fully comprehensible, but as the protagonist writing in first person epistolary was a poet on the way to being a genius, it would have helped.
The plot--a research prison infects its prisoners with a derivative of syphilis that makes them geniuses and then kills them.
This is an antiwar book--the megalomaniac head of the pr ...more
The plot--a research prison infects its prisoners with a derivative of syphilis that makes them geniuses and then kills them.
This is an antiwar book--the megalomaniac head of the pr ...more
-Más exitosa como concepto que desde el punto de vista puramente narrativo, sin que este sea un fracaso en realidad.-
Género. Ciencia-Ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. En una realidad distinta a la nuestra, en la que Robert McNamara llegó a la presidencia de los USA, Louis Sacchetti es un culto escritor, algo pomposo y bastante carente de modestia, que está encarcelado por negarse a servir en el ejército y al que trasladan a una instalación secreta conocida como Campo Arquímedes, al mando del general Ha ...more
Género. Ciencia-Ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. En una realidad distinta a la nuestra, en la que Robert McNamara llegó a la presidencia de los USA, Louis Sacchetti es un culto escritor, algo pomposo y bastante carente de modestia, que está encarcelado por negarse a servir en el ejército y al que trasladan a una instalación secreta conocida como Campo Arquímedes, al mando del general Ha ...more
May 27, 2008
Printable Tire
added it
I was blown away by Disch's 334: it didn't really move me, didn't really speak or make sense to me, but I could tell there was something to it, something maybe over my head a little bit; in other words, it seemed like something Don Delillo would write. I was pretty disappointed by Camp Concentration. It turned out to be more or less an experiment in 19th century narrative style and self-psychoanalysis. The plot could best be summed up as a more pretentious version of Flowers for Algernon. Not a
...more
This is Flowers for Algernon on LSD. I really like how the author plays with alchemy in an sf novel. It reminds me of that old saying (from PK Dick?) that to civilizations less advanced than ours, technology would be indistinguishable from magic (and that to us, a civilization more advanced would be magical to us).
First published in 1968; from what I just read it wasn’t until 1972 that it was public knowledge the US Gov’t had injected rural black men with syphilis in experiments. Crazy how this ...more
First published in 1968; from what I just read it wasn’t until 1972 that it was public knowledge the US Gov’t had injected rural black men with syphilis in experiments. Crazy how this ...more
While I'm generally not a sci-fi kind of guy, this is something worth reading, especially if you're into dystopian scenarios. Disch can actually write passages of real intelligence and create convincing characters, which separates him from most other genre writers. While I still had trouble with the speculative environment-- an issue I often run into with guys like this, even when they're talented, it was certainly a worthy read.
May 26, 2016
Fabulantes
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
ciencia-ficcion
Reseña: http://www.fabulantes.com/2016/05/cam...
"El paso del tiempo no ha hecho más que acrecentar el valor de Campo de concentración, tanto por su ambición como por su capacidad de demostrar los todavía lejanos límites del género, aún no superados. Esta novela todavía figura entre lo mejor de su autor y de la ciencia-ficción."
"El paso del tiempo no ha hecho más que acrecentar el valor de Campo de concentración, tanto por su ambición como por su capacidad de demostrar los todavía lejanos límites del género, aún no superados. Esta novela todavía figura entre lo mejor de su autor y de la ciencia-ficción."
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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
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“Genius is an infinite capacity for pain.”
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“Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.”
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