Thomas M. Disch
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Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940) is a science fiction and horror writer also known for his criticism of the field.
He was one of the writers discovered by Cele Goldsmith Lalli in the 1960s, when she was editing Amazing. His first novel, The Genocides (1965), was a disaster tale in which giant vegetation takes over the Earth; as in the similar books of John Wyndham and J.G. Ballard, humanity is utterly defeated. He moved to the United Kingdom, where that sort of sf is more popular, and began writing for New Worlds. His next two books, Mankind under the Leash (1966, also published as White Fang Goes Dingo) and Echo round His Bones (1967), were minor amusements. In 1968 he hit his stride with Camp Concentration, a complex tale, echoing Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and other versions of the Faust legend, set in an oppressive near future. At that time, too, he began writing the stories collected in 334 (1972), a critically acclaimed fix-up.
Disch came out as gay in the Seventies, and his final sf novel, On Wings of Song (1979), treated flying as a metaphor for homosexuality. The next year brought his most popular work, The Brave Little Toaster, a retelling of The Musicians of Bremen with kitchen appliances instead of animals, which was made into a Disney cartoon.
He then began a thematically connected series of horror novels, set in Minnesota and named after professions. The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984) is a hilarious farce. The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991) begins with Santa Claus appearing to a child who's just been told by the nuns at his school that there is no Santa, and turns into a grim tale of future plague. [[The Priest: A Gothic
Romance]] (1994) is scathing about Disch's cradle religion, but sympathetic to the title character and others caught in the church's toils. The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999) is likewise farcical, but perhaps less successful than The Businessman.
For almost as long as he has been known as a fiction writer, Disch has also been a controversial critic of sf. He has described the culture in terms of "embarrassment" and "cripples," reduced Starship Troopers to gay subtext, and complained of the existence of the Labor Day Group, a collection of dissimilar writers held together by writing sf that panders to the readers and thus wins Hugoes (awarded on Labor Day weekend). The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998) considered sf as kin to religious and self-improvement crank groups. It won the Nonfiction Hugo in 1999. On SF collects Disch's other critical writings on the field.
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