Thomas M. Disch (2 February 1940 – 4 July 2008)

Thomas M. Disch, science fiction writer and poet, committed suicide July 4 in New York. He was sixty-eight years old.

Disch was an exceptionally talented writer. Unfortunately, he was a man without hope, without which no man can survive. A futurist who had little use for the future, Disch specialized in stories of humans struggling to survive against inhuman, invincible forces outside of their control. His first novel, 1965's The Genocides, is a bleak no-future tale in which the entire human race is wiped out by aliens; his (arguable) magnum opus, 334 (1972), is a detailed examination of the grim, banal, and ultimately futile lives of the inhabitants of the titular New York City address in a Tomorrow where the Great Society envisioned by the technocratic macro-planners of the late 1960s/early 1970s has become a reality. Anyone who has ever wondered what America would have been like if the fondest dreams of well-intentioned '60s liberals had come true need only consult 334, which depicts in grimy detail a nation of hedonistic underachievers, living cheek-by-jowl in huge, crumbling urban housing blocks, tranquilized by mindless TV and legal drugs and insulated from risk by the benevolence of MODICUM, the federal government's all-encompassing welfare apparatus. Imagine a world run by the Food Stamp bureau — that's 334.

His disdain for the techno-utopianism common to the science fiction of the 1950s and early '60s was not a personal flaw, however; rather, it was born of a deep-seated desire for honesty on Disch's part. As did most of his New Wave contemporaries, Disch considered the traditional American SF idea of the Hopeful Future both dishonest and adolescent; like them, his goal was to give it to the reader "straight" — i.e. to attempt to give readers an "adult" perspective — an "honest" (i.e. essentially hopeless) future, without flinching and with no punches pulled.

Despite his disdain for the Wonderful World of Tomorrow, however, Disch brought a rare gift to readers of science fiction: quality. Amid the dull dross that inhabits the dubious treasure box of commercial English-language fiction, Disch's works are gems of considerable sparkle: his settings are evocative and integral to the text, his prose and dialog are carefully polished, and certain of his characters have an almost Dostoyevskyan depth and luster. Ultimately, however, these shining qualities are subdued by the flaw of gray, depressing nihilism that lies at their core.

A certain misanthropy lay at the base of the New Wave movement; as a group, the New Wavers did not have much use for mankind. As did the Existentialists that predated them, the writers of SF's New Wave ultimately held that Man was the problem, not the solution, and that only a future without Man could honestly be called "hopeful". Disch and his New Wave contemporaries employed the world-destroying tropes of SF to realize the maxim l'enfer, c'est les autres in a fashion of which Sartre and the Existentialitsts of the past could only have dreamed, and to which the Earth-Firsters and Human Extinctionists of our day can only aspire. It may be that in the end that nihilism rose up and consumed him. (Ordinarily, I'd trot out Nietszche's well-worn quote regarding the Abyss here, but the man is dead, and it's too late at night for that literary crap.) Suffice it to say therefore that Thomas Disch was a talented writer, an influential critic, and a suffering human being. Despite his suicide, I pray that in his final moments he managed to open his heart to the Man that saves all men, and that he has somehow found in the Hands of a merciful God the hope that eluded him in life.