Comments on: RIP Thomas Disch

RIP Thomas Disch

ed — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:15:31 -0800

Thomas M. Disch, the author of such New Wave classics as Camp Concentration and 334, is dead. He committed suicide on July 4th. Disch's LiveJournal.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:19:08 -0800

Whoa. I'm sorry to hear it.

By: Your Time Machine Sucks

Your Time Machine Sucks — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:22:09 -0800

Damn.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:34:14 -0800

I made a post about his death that I posted after this one. Here are some of the links I had collected: 5 stories, some poems, New York Times author page, interview from 2001, Bat Segundo audio interview and Locus obituary. Great writer. I'll have to go to the library and check out what they have.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:36:05 -0800

Let's try some of that again, New York Times author page and some poems.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:54:26 -0800

Shit.

By: h00py

h00py — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:55:38 -0800

Wow, I remember getting my dad to buy "Amnesia" all those years ago. I didn't remember that it was written by Thomas Disch. Excellent game (although I was pretty bad at it, not having much of a sense of direction). I read the novel "The MD" a few years ago and wasn't particularly impressed but I remember really enjoying a lot of his short stories from his New Wave period. What a shame he lost the light at the end of the cliche.

By: Kid Charlemagne

Kid Charlemagne — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:36:36 -0800

By: anotherpanacea

anotherpanacea — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:40:58 -0800

Could anyone who has read the new book, The Word of God comment on the connection? it had the strange conceit of being a first person account of deification, which made me worry a bit.

By: drezdn

drezdn — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:43:41 -0800

I really enjoyed most of what I read by him (Camp Concentration, Genocides). For a while now, I'd been following his livejournal and thought he was a bit of a curmudgeon. That said: .

By: Faint of Butt

Faint of Butt — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:45:01 -0800

Damn. We've lost a good one. I hope he's found the peace he wanted.

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:46:44 -0800

Pity. I liked camp concentration, though I hear he went a bit strange towards the end (a bit of an occupational hazard). He eaves behind the term Dischism, which I've sometimes found useful: The unwitting intrusion of the author's physical surroundings, or the author's own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision -- when this is actually the author's condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. "Dischism" is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)

By: ThePinkSuperhero

ThePinkSuperhero — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:46:47 -0800

By: crataegus

crataegus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:50:56 -0800

By: 445supermag

445supermag — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:54:38 -0800

I remember reading "The Brave Little Toaster" in F&FS many years ago, thinking,"What a great story, so different from everything around it".

By: aught

aught — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:02:23 -0800

. For many of us whose formative sf-reading years were the 1970s, Disch (along with Delany, Zelazny, Ellison, LeGuin and Russ) was one of the absolute must-reads. His more recent critical opinions sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, but his books Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, and 334 remain vivid in my mind thirty years later.

By: Fuzzy Monster

Fuzzy Monster — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:06:37 -0800

Thanks for the link to Disch's LiveJournal. Damn, the man could write.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:13:13 -0800

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:23:01 -0800

Oh, my God. And suicide. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful. I met him once. I was working for a new media company about 20 years ago and I mentioned Disch and the boss said he'd invite him to the opening party. As promised, Disch showed up, all in leather, cruised the party looking for action I think, and split. I don't remember exchanging three words to him. :-( (Later that night the boss threw a punch at me and then fell on the ground crying when I blocked it (he'd been hitting on the secretary, 20+ years his junior with a boyfriend, and I was delegated to politely tell him to knock it off - but he was very drunk).) . for Tom Disch. What a shame, what a shame. Everyone should read his book of short stories, "Getting Into Death." "Everyone knows about Apollo and Daphne — how he pursued her, how she resisted, how at the last possible moment she was changed into the lovely Lever House, which we can see to this day on the corner of 53rd Street and Park Avenue."

By: jlbartosa

jlbartosa — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:42:30 -0800

Very, very sad.

By: 235w103

235w103 — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:55:02 -0800

Man, I first heard of him just two weeks ago, and I'd been waiting to pick up 334.

By: longdaysjourney

longdaysjourney — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:55:47 -0800

Damn it. Such a great writer.

By: grouse

grouse — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:59:00 -0800

I thought Amnesia was really hard. But really interesting. It was hard to imagine it came from the same mind as The Brave Little Toaster. .

By: BT

BT — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:00:20 -0800

Very sad news. I am sorry I didn't know about the LJ before...there's some wryly dark stuff there, now the more moving in light of his death.

By: outlier

outlier — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:00:27 -0800

Shit. That's what I said when I read the headline. The death of celebrities or heros rarely causes me to be more than a little sad. After all, I don't really know them or I only know their public image, and the before and after of their existence will look much the same. The stretch between books becomes a little longer, they show up on TV less, the body of work they produced remains. And to mourn when there are people, loved ones, who are feeling a real and personal loss - it seems cheap, disrespectful. But damn, Disch was a talent. He wrote books that made you jealous you'd never write anything half as good. He wrote about ideas that you'd never think could be made to work, but did. And they managed to be entertaining and interesting and worthy, all at once. You find out that he's dead and think, "We just lost something. We lost something rare. Shit."

By: kurumi

kurumi — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:01:09 -0800

I remember him most for his non-fiction The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of, an engaging, gossipy examination of science fiction in 20th century pop culture, including tropes, Scientology, feminism, politics, and more. .

By: Lentrohamsanin

Lentrohamsanin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:05:07 -0800

A brief statement from his friend the novelist John Crowley, who promises a longer memorial later.

By: Ber

Ber — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:06:34 -0800

By: localroger

localroger — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:14:37 -0800

By: longdaysjourney

longdaysjourney — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:22:36 -0800

I had no idea he worked on The Lion King. His landlord sounds like a complete ass.

By: aerotive

aerotive — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:28:15 -0800

By: y2karl

y2karl — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:36:29 -0800

...his books Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song and 334 remain vivid in my mind thirty years later.

About once a week, I think about some aspect of one thing or another from what he wrote--fairies and fairy traps from On The Wings of Song; Birdie Ludd's problems of creativeness in 334, the would be child murderers in Angouleme therefrom or the syphilitic prisoner genii in Camp Concentration, under constant surveillance, and how, too late, the experiment gets shut down on the spot by their terrified wardens when they decide they'll just work out their secret escape plan by just talking about alchemy and stuff right there in the out right on mike open air. And he died a suicide. This is so very sad.

By: Iosephus

Iosephus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:43:47 -0800

It sounds like he was having some very shitty years in a row. I didn't know. 334 was an extraordinary book... .

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:54:38 -0800

Patrick Nielsen-Hayden on Disch.

By: blucevalo

blucevalo — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:08:49 -0800

These are some incredibly saddening links, particularly around the circumstances of his death. I'd never read any of Disch's work, but intend to do so. Thanks for this.

By: mecran01

mecran01 — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:08:53 -0800

As to Big Idea # 2, I'll get to that later. (from his Livejournal, July 1st, 2008)

By: bardic

bardic — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:10:03 -0800

Very sad. Philip Dick references him in one of his last novels as one of the few authors worth reading these days (which would have been the late 70's). VALIS, I think. I'll have to go check.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:16:23 -0800

Oh, no! .

By: Shepherd

Shepherd — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:22:09 -0800

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:22:24 -0800

Eerily, at the same time that Disch was committing suicide, a friend and I were recommending Disch to my girlfriend.

By: A189Nut

A189Nut — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:31:49 -0800

At least writing lives forever. I will miss him.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:41:13 -0800

God, that's really awful.

By: lodurr

lodurr — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:41:14 -0800

Gibson's note. A truly original writer. SF will be poorer for loss of him.

By: Slithy_Tove

Slithy_Tove — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:09:31 -0800

By: merelyglib

merelyglib — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:27:24 -0800

One of my all-time favorite authors. I was so excited last month when I heard he had something new coming out that it sent me into a Disch-fit and i had to reread his older stuff. Thank you all for the rich links (leading to places with even more rich links), I'll be mining them for weeks. It sounds like the last years of his life were horrible. I hope he found some peace. .

By: BitterOldPunk

BitterOldPunk — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:37:21 -0800

Disch, Dick, Lem, and Wolfe were The Canon, as far as I was concerned. Wolfe is the last one left. Dammit. This sucks. All my heroes are dying. .

By: batmonkey

batmonkey — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:38:30 -0800

Gods, that's unfortunate. .

By: Divine_Wino

Divine_Wino — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:51:23 -0800

Dammit. He was one of the best, a real mindbender.

By: Lex Tangible

Lex Tangible — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:59:45 -0800

By: rusty

rusty — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:59:47 -0800

I ws at William & Mary during his "Artist in Residence" year, but I didn't have the faintest idea who he was at the time. I eventually found out, far too late, and still see that as one of the great missed opportunities of my life.

By: cstross

cstross — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:15:23 -0800

Not. Happy. Right. Now.

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:43:11 -0800

By: nanojath

nanojath — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:44:30 -0800

I had no idea he had been struck by so many hardships and losses in recent years, or that he was writing online. Maybe it is just the statistical realities of pushing middle age (and thus your heroes, giants, bright lights and luminaries heading into old age) but it has been a hard damn century so far.

By: Guy_Inamonkeysuit

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:20:27 -0800

OMG OMG -- I had no idea. This is so so so so sad... 334, Camp Concentration, Echo Round His Bones, Descending... oh I am so ready to cry. God dammit. God fucking dammit.

By: hifiparasol

hifiparasol — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:04:43 -0800

Tom had been depressed for several years... He also was very worried about being evicted from the rent controlled apartment he lived in for decades. Dammit. Killed, more or less, by his own fears and anxieties. Having dealt with depression and anxiety attacks, I can definitely relate. Camp Concentration was the best book I read in college. This sucks.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:43:20 -0800

Wolfe is the last one left. Your canon is missing Jack Vance--who still lives. But then I would put Vance before Lem by an order of magnitude or two any day of the year. As would Gene Wolfe, or so I suspect.

By: BitterOldPunk

BitterOldPunk — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:07:20 -0800

I had no idea Jack Vance was still alive. And you're right, y2karl, I damn well should have included him.

By: Guy_Inamonkeysuit

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:35:26 -0800

Vance, great as he is, y2karl, is by no means to be compared to Lem. The two are utterly dissimilar. Lem, Wolfe, Dick, and Disch do indeed go together -- but Vance? No no no. His use of language is second to none but he is not the trailblazer Lem was, or Wolfe is. And I suspect he would agree with that. I would put Chip Delany in there before Vance -- who was not New Wave in any case. (Not that Lem was.) Shit, I'd put Harlan Ellison in there before Vance. /derail

By: Chrysostom

Chrysostom — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:34:09 -0800

I'd put Harlan Ellison in there before Vance. Setting aside his personal flaws-something I think he goes to great lengths to make difficult-I'm not sure Ellison's writing is holding up that well. A lot of his work seems to be impressive verbal pyrotechnics without a lot of substance beneath. He's always struck me as a very clever man who is about 15% less clever than he thinks.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:02:41 -0800

Lem, Wolfe, Dick, and Disch do indeed go together -- but Vance? Ahem... The Dying Earth - Jack Vance The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick Go together ? Utterly dissimilar ?

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:22:16 -0800

The firts two are a lot more similar than the third, and TBH even those are not really as similar as they might seem on first glance.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:49:42 -0800

Ah, but one is quite clearly in part an homage to the other and, also, one Gene Wolfe has written an essay entitled The Living Earth.

By: lodurr

lodurr — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:18:00 -0800

If you look at the corpus, Vance ends up not looking that similar to Disch, Wolfe or Dick. True, he was ahead of his time (yes, I realize he's not dead, but he's not ahead of his time anymore), and wrote stuff that stretched the genre, but then so did Bester. (Dick goes without saying.) I don't know a ton of Wolfe, but from what I have read (probably five or six stories) he always struck me as someone whose work was just not as fundamentally out-there as Disch. Which is not a put down on Wolfe, I just don't think that's what he was after. Dick could be an interesting and highly competent stylist in his own right, but that was the exception rather than the rule. He was mostly about ideas and scenarios and getting it all out on the bookstands as fast as possible. Thinking about Disch v. Dick makes me think of a great quote from Sterling, w.r.t. Ballard v. Burroughs: "He's willing to stare into the same abyss as Burroughs, but he'd never sit there in a heroin stupor as the abyss started eating its way up his leg." (Having known as many clinically depressed people as I have, the comparison doesn't actually make me feel a lot of irony at the manner of Disch's passing.) Aside: Disch has a fair amount of talking-head time in this PKD documentary.

By: Guy_Inamonkeysuit

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:29:04 -0800

*shrug* I don't think Vance belongs in that list of "trailblazers," is all I am saying, and I'll go with that. TDE and BOTNS have far-future settings -- so do lots of sf books. The tone and themes of TDE and Wolfe's work are nothing alike, for my money. Sure Wolfe owes something to Vance but then everyone who writes sf owes something to Wells. (Or Heinlein... or Asimov... or Clarke... or Hugo Gernsback. ) Dammit, I love Vance and have read tons of his work, but he just ain't in the same league as Wolfe, Lem, Dick, and Disch. IMHO.

By: Guy_Inamonkeysuit

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:30:24 -0800

And even Dick was essentially just a pulp hack -- until he went bonkers, then he was off somewhere else. Too much derail, I apologize.

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:30:39 -0800

Clarke Ashton Smith gets screwed yet again...

By: paddbear

paddbear — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:48:37 -0800

By: generalist

generalist — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:14:21 -0800

By: drezdn

drezdn — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:13:06 -0800

The LA Times remembers Disch.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:20:45 -0800

I don't think Vance belongs in that list of "trailblazers," is all I am saying... For you he's not a trailblazer. For me, To Live Forever, The Languages of Pao, Ulward's Retreat and Rumfuddle all come to mind as examples of innovative and ground breaking work of the first rank in concept alone. Emphyrio is nearly universally recognized as a classic of the genre:

'All Vance's novels have exotic locales and cultures, resourceful heroes, and vigorous action, but in Emphyrio they are raised to the pitch of perfection, making the novel a tremendous pleasure to read, and giving it also a mysterious beauty' Kim Stanley Robinson 'Mr. Vance has written a fine book. Reading Emphyrio is like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope... and this combination of strange things seeming familiar and familiar things suddenly becoming strange is the oddest and the finest in the world... I really cannot do it justice. Mr. Vance knows about childhood, grief, love, social structure, idealism, and loss, but none of these breaks the perfect surface of the hook; everything is cool, funny, and recognisable while at the same time everything is melancholy, real, and indescribably strange.' Joanna Russ, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Not to mention the Moon Moth and Green Magic. And then there is the whole xenosociological wonderment of Vance--how he could invent intricately detailed worlds, cultures, tribes and customs simply for the support of a sentence or two in a passage:

I have spoken of, and tried--in vain I know (for, as I said, only long, continuous reading brings out the subtleties)--to illustrate Vance's ability to create fully sensed, in-depth, complex, real-seeming worlds. If you don't already know Vance, you may be thinking along the lines of "Now that's well and fine, but most good authors can construct complex worlds in some degree of detail; why is this guy harping so on Vance?" I will put aside the deeper depth and richer richness and more elegant elegance Vance achieves compared to most worldmakers to focus on what makes him extraordinary--no, more than extraordinary, unique. That special something is--we should have drum rolls here--Vance's ability to conjure up whole and complete worlds and societies so quickly, so easily, that he can use them as throwaways. Every SF&F author is bound to imagine a world different from our own in some way or ways, and to convey to us with a scope commensurate with the scale of the difference the nature and flavor of that world. Good SF&F authors imagine complex worlds for their tales; what Jack Vance does is imagine thoroughly complex worlds so easily, so capably, that he can use them as toys irrelevant to his tales; he does it just for fun; and he throws one after another of these full-scale worlds away in a few pages or, sometimes, a mere few paragraphs. They are like doodles in the margin, yet each is something that most other writers, even good ones, would have had to labor long and hard over as a prime project.

Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works - Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Jack Vance He is a dissimilar writer to Disch and Dick, for sure, but he shares many things with Gene Wolfe, not the least of which are a love for the obscure and arcane terms of description. And don't forget, Wolfe goes so far as to put The Dying Earth on the shelves of Ultan's Library. And that's my end of the derail.

By: lodurr

lodurr — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:36:47 -0800

You may well ahve a point. As I try to put myself into sense-memories of the Vancean and Wolfean head-spaces, they're pretty similar. For whatever that's worth, which is most likely 1/10,000 of a cup of diner coffee.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:25:38 -0800

Well, just for the record:

Lawrence Person: Early in your career, critics placed you both inside and outside the New Wave. How heavily did the New Wave influence your own work, and did you feel you were a part of it? Gene Wolfe: I don't think I was heavily influenced by the New Wave. If I was a part of it, I was only a very remote, peripheral person. I suppose the epicenter of the New Wave was J. G. Ballard, although you might dispute that, and certainly I was at a great distance from J. G. Ballard. But if I could sell a story because of that connection, I was happy to do it... Lawrence Person: How heavy an influence was Jack Vance, and how much did you use The Dying Earth as a conscious template for The Book of the New Sun? Gene Wolfe: It was very considerable. I did not try to write an imitation of The Dying Earth. I certainly took that idea from Jack Vance. I had read that years and years before and had been enormously impressed with it. So yeah, he was a very considerable influence. I'm sure that's where I got the basic idea that's behind The Book of the New Sun, the idea of remote antiquity and looming catastrophe.

Suns New, Long, and Short: An Interview with Gene Wolfe

By: y2karl

y2karl — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:12:05 -0800

On topic: Remembering Thomas M. Disch:

Disch was an often brutal satirist who wrote a beloved children's book about sweet-natured household appliances, an ironist who would cheer up a visitor by reading aloud poems ostensibly penned by Paddington the Bear, in Paddington's voice. He reveled in coincidence, in life and art. With Naylor, he wrote a marvelous historical novel, "Neighboring Lives," that explored the web of connections between Victorian thinkers and artists in Pre-Raphaelite London. Naylor gave him joy; "On Wings of Song" was dedicated to him. Almost exactly a year after Naylor's death in September 2004, Disch began writing a sequence of poems, an extraordinary efflorescence of grief he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence "Winter Journey" after Schubert's lieder cycle "Winterreise" (a work Naylor loved). The poems are tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending -- and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller -- an irony Disch would have appreciated. "The song does not end," Disch wrote in the closing pages of "On Wings of Song."
... and though he had written that song before he'd learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one's body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.