Thomas M. Disch

Thomas M. Disch (February 2, 1940 – ) is an American science fiction author. He has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards several times.

Cultural Background

Culturally, Thomas Disch traveled what now seems like a traditional American path: spending the 1940s and 1950s growing up in the Midwest, he tore away to the Big City as a young adult, entering the 1960s with hungry experimentalism and precocious glee. Although Disch is widely traveled, and has lived in England, Spain, Rome, and Mexico, Disch has remained a New Yorker for the past twenty years. He admits, "a city like New York, to my mind, is the whole world." Now in his 60s, he has moved upstate, but he still maintains working and cultural ties to the City.

Related Topics:
1940s - 1950s - England - Spain - Rome - Mexico

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As mentioned, Disch's New York began with a string of blue-collar jobs, working full-time while attending college. When he did those jobs, he was trying his best to leave behind the influence of his father, a traveling salesman; he dipped into a wide variety of jobs - almost anything that would keep him afloat - while he investigated his many interests. Some of these jobs paid off later - for instance doing grunt-work in New York theater culture allowed him to both pursue his life-long love of drama and led to work as a magazine theater critic. Before his critical and non-fiction work, however, he started with short stories, poetry, and eventually novels.

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His first published poems, though reaching print later (the first in 1964, though not collected until 1972), were written alongside the stories and novels which made his name in the 1960s. Although he presented his poetry presented to a different audience than his fiction — even simplifying his by-line from Thomas M. Disch to Tom Disch — both genres emerged from the same expanding mind and changing times. Disch entered the field of science fiction at a turning point, as the pulp adventure stories of its older style began to be challenged by a more serious, adult, and often darker style. This movement, called "New Wave", tried to show that the ideas and themes of science fiction could be developed past the simple desires of an audience of twelve-year-olds. Rather than trying to compete with mainstream writers on the New York literary scene, Disch plunged into the emerging genre of science fiction, and began to work to liberate it from some of its strict formula and narrow conventions. Much of his more literary science fiction was first published in English author Michael Moorcock's New Wave magazine, New Worlds.

Related Topics:
1964 - 1972 - Pulp adventure - New Wave - Michael Moorcock

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During his long and varied career, Disch has found his way into other forms and genres. Still, as a fiction writer and a poet, Disch feels typecast by his science fiction roots. "I have a class theory of literature. I come from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how good I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from." (Horwitz 2001) Sour grapes or not, he clearly thinks that no matter how far from that genre his writing goes, he has deep cultural roots in science fiction.

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In 1987 Disch collaborated with New Jersey software company Cognetics Corp. and games publisher Electronic Arts to create the interactive fiction text adventure Amnesia, which could be played on the Commodore 64, IBM PC or Apple II computers. The title, based on technology pioneered by Cognetics' Charles Kreitzberg, was produced by Don Daglow and programmed by Kevin Bentley. It showcased Disch's vivid writing, a stark contrast to other game-programmer-written text adventures of the time, and his passion for the energy of the city of New York. Although the text adventure format was dying by the time Amnesia was released and it enjoyed limited success, the game pioneered ideas that would later become popular in game design by modeling the entire Manhattan street map south of 110th St. and allowing the player to visit any street corner in that part of the city in their quest to advance the story. Although the limited floppy disk capacity of the 1980s computers caused much of Disch's original text about the city to be cut, many Manhattan sites and people were described with unique loving distortion through the Disch lens.

Related Topics:
1987 - New Jersey - Cognetics Corp - Electronic Arts - Interactive fiction - Text adventure - Amnesia - Commodore 64 - IBM PC - Apple II - Charles Kreitzberg - Don Daglow - Floppy disk - 1980s

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Disch's private life remains private, for the most part. He has been publicly gay since 1968; this comes out occasionally in his poetry and particularly in his 1979 novel On Wings of Song. He does not try to write to a particular community: "I'm gay myself, but I don't write 'gay' literature." (Horwitz 2001) This increases his universality though it perhaps deprives him of a loyal fan-base. He rarely mentions his sexuality in interviews, and it does not seem to be part of how his readers regard him.

Related Topics:
Gay - 1968 - 1979 - On Wings of Song

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In America, Disch's poetry remained little known until a 1989 mid-career retrospective collection, titled Yes, Let's. A book of new poetry, Dark Verses & Light, followed in 1991. In 1995 and 2002, Disch published two collections of poetry criticism. He continues to regularly publish poetry in magazines and journals such as Poetry, Light, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and even Theology Today (perhaps an odd choice for a long-lapsed Catholic).

Related Topics:
1989 - 1991 - 1995 - 2002

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