{"id":310,"date":"2008-07-07T23:06:27","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T04:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=310"},"modified":"2010-07-18T21:56:36","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T02:56:36","slug":"author-of-the-genocides-commits-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"Author of &#8220;The Genocides&#8221; commits suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Disch <a href=\"http:\/\/locusmag.com\/2008\/Disch_Obit.html\">committed suicide<\/a> on July 4th. I wouldn&#8217;t bother writing about this, except that offing himself was a perfect correspondence to what he tried to do to science fiction (the art form with which he was most associated).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Disch was bitchy, clever, and depressive &mdash; Oscar Wilde in the gutter but without the looking-at-the-stars part.  His SF writing was bitchy, clever, and depressive too &mdash; much of it to the point of near unreadability even for me, a scholar of the field with a strong stomach.  To actually enjoy it would have required a specialized form of masochism rare in any population other than English Lit majors.<\/p>\n<p>Disch was very nearly a walking paint-by-numbers picture of the Western literary intellectual in a state of decadence: hard-left politics, check; critical essays politely described as &#8216;acerbic&#8217; but often better characterized as petty and venomous, check; nihilistic self-pitying bitterness, check; rambling self-indulgent free-verse poetry, <a href=\"http:\/\/tomsdisch.livejournal.com\/\">check<\/a>. I&#8217;d be surprised if there weren&#8217;t a drug or alcohol problem in there somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>It sucked to be Thomas Disch; even his admirers used words like &#8220;bitter&#8221;, &#8220;mean&#8221;, and &#8220;curmudgeon&#8221; to <a href=\"http:\/\/ellen-datlow.livejournal.com\/93886.html\">describe him<\/a>.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, it sucked to be affected or influenced by him, too. He was one of the stars of the &#8220;New Wave&#8221;, a movement of the 1960s and early 1970s that tried to &#8220;reform&#8221; SF from the superficialities of its pulp-genre origins. If you weren&#8217;t there, you may safely guess that these &#8220;superficialities&#8221; included most of what made SF appealing, then and to this day.  The agenda of Disch&#8217;s writing and criticism was clear; he wanted SF to be just as incapable of joy and innocence and optimism as he was himself, and confused this bleakness with &#8220;maturity&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The SF field recovered from the New Wave in the early 1980s.  Disch did not.  As Patrick Nielsen Hayden <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/makinglight\/archives\/010413.html#010413\">observes<\/a>, &#8220;Disch played the game of literary politics hard and sometimes lost badly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I would predict a swift descent into well-deserved obscurity for Disch&#8217;s work, except that the arts intelligentsia fetishizes people like him &mdash; now that he&#8217;s safely dead, he may well undergo the same sort of entirely undeserved canonization as (say) Philip K. Dick.<\/p>\n<p>I risk uttering a cliche by observing that Thomas M. Disch died a broken man.  The truth behind that is that he was never whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Disch committed suicide on July 4th. I wouldn&#8217;t bother writing about this, except that offing himself was a perfect correspondence to what he tried to do to science fiction (the art form with which he was most associated).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}