Thomas Disch is dead

Disch was a giant. Terrible loss.

3:Malzberg would indeed be on my list in 1, and I didn’t mean to slight by exclusion.

I went thru some Amazon reviews of On Wings of Song, and sometimes, in an arrogance that amazes me, I think I am the only one who “got it”
It is on one level a compassionate, even spiritual treatment of otherness and outsiderness and tolerance, and on another simultaneous level a totally hilarious ridiculous Swiftian vicious indictment of such sentiments and victimology. It is also an attack on SF.

And an attack on its readers. By increments and small narratives we are led to the final stage act of cross-dressing anti-fundamentalist spiritual fairies (and whatever, it has been years). I remember laughing out loud that Disch had managed to pull off such a stunt, that the readers could not only find the end plausible but morally serious and enlightening. But of course, in his irony, it is.

A masterpiece among his other masterpieces. Disch is far better and more important than Gide, for one.

The man who wrote 334 wrote a book about fairies?

Don’t forget his most famous work:

http://www.amazon.com/Brave-Little-Toaster-Thomas-Disch/dp/0385230508

I liked the first review of Brave Little Toaster on Amazon UK: ‘I found this book thoroughly delightful, and am hoping it is an introduction for me of a thoroughly delightful writer.’ Oh dear.

PKD, nothin’ — it seems at least as absurd that reviewers should have so closely attended the Amises while Disch was available. As a satirist his mordacity was crocodilian in its breadth, but his tears seemed genuine enough. Besides the pieces already mentioned, I often think about The Genocides (his first novel, characteristically calculated to offend community standards), his American gothics The Businessman and The M.D., and his short story collections, with the most slippery-toned stories my favorites: “The Squirrel Cage,” “The Master of the Milford Altarpiece,” “Getting Into Death,” “The City of Penetrating Light,” ….

His blog certainly reads like the blog of someone who is contemplating suicide.

Barry Malzberg “the best SF writer de nos jours”? Get real.

PKD was kind of unpretentious. He was willing to be a moderately-bad writer telling a good story, and he had whole books where no character was in control of much.

I kind of liked reading Disch but somehow when I finished a Disch story I usually felt kind of dirty.

Malzburg was uneven, I read some of his work that wasn’t very good first and never got around to the better stuff.

Lafferty was a seminal genius, but he wrote for himself and for the people who were willing to take him on his own terms. He couldn’t get real popular that way.

I dunno. I’m glad they all got published. Too bad Lafferty became unpublishable. I hear he has thousands of pages that will never be published even in small press.

Science fiction really has changed.

A generation ago Samuel Delany could write a quick 200 pages and publish it with Ace or DAW and get a quick $300 to $500, equivalent to maybe $1500 to $3000 today. He could write pretty much whatever he wanted and they’d publish it. Science fiction was whatever paperback was on the shelves with a picture of a bug-eyed monster on the front.

Now there are a lot of readers and a lot more writers. A clear sense of what style is acceptable. Far more gets published than any one person could possibly read, and the community is large enough that word of mouth won’t help an unknown book much before it’s out of print.

New ideas now wind up being so unfamiliar that people boggle at them.

Aliens like intelligent cats: not new.
Aliens like intelligent oak trees: hard to understand.

War using space armadas and planet-busters: not new.
War using genetically-modified humans who will cause genome collapse in 20 generations: hard to understand.

Maybe the new ideas were just as hard to understand back then, but the stories didn’t have to introduce them smoothly while following interesting characters having interesting believable social interactions in a believale society that feels familiar while being fundamentally different and also exploring deep philosophical dilemmas.

The field has matured. It’s hard for a writer to be good at everything at once. But to get out of the slush pile, he needs to write well and have interesting characters first. Originality is on the list but it’s pretty far down.

So the writers who’re particularly original will tend to move on. Science fiction isn’t so attractive for them any more.

I only know Disch through his poetry and his criticism, not through the novels. In 1990 I saw an unforgettable performance of his blank verse monologue “The Cardinal Detoxes” at the RAPP theater in New York City’s East Village. (The Archdiocese of New York attempted, unsuccessfully, to close the play, since they owned the building housing the theater.) This work was included in The Best American Poetry 1994 and once again in Harold Bloom’s “Best of the Best” (1988-97) collection. His book of criticism “The Castle of Indolence” was pretty illuminating about the state of poetry in the 80’s and 90’s.

Neil Gaiman has an excellent Lafferty pastiche in one of his story collections. It is a measure of the man’s uniqueness that I read the first sentence and said “Lafferty!”

OK, OK. I guess it probably took me the whole first paragraph. Nothing is more dampening to the amateur literary critic than being taken literally all the time.

Certainly by the time you get to Zephaniah T. Crabcrustle there is no longer any doubt.

By the way, how would you explain Gaiman’s affinity for Catholic reactionaries (Chesterton being the other instance)?

I always wondered if the character “Droney Laffety” (an necrophiliac with a job related means of getting, uh, ‘dates’) in Alfred Bester’s Golem 100 was supposed to be R. A. Lafferty.

Have you read Black Alice by Disch and Sladek? (Sometimes as by Thom Demijohn?) Wicked, wicked kidnap thriller set in the American south. Brilliant.

Good! I didn’t want to dampen an amateur literary critic. I don’t want to be just having fun when somebody else thinks I’m peeing on them. ;-)