I’m one of the great mass of fans because of whom Thomas Disch was, in John Clute’s words, “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied, and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers”. My knowledge of his oeuvre is nugatory, so I didn’t feel at all qualified to say anything when he died (by his own hand, sadly, impelled by illness, personal troubles, financial straits and who knows what else?) on the Fourth of July. Happily, Joseph Bottum, who knew him well, has crafted an excellent brief obituary, from which I excerpt a few paragraphs:
[T]he truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn’t do with words. In 1980, he banged out a children’s tale called “The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances” that became a popular Disney film. In 1987, he penned a screenplay for Miami Vice: the weirdest episode of that television program, starring – if I remember correctly – the soul singer James Brown as an extraterrestrial and the gawky young Chris Rock as a hitman, with some inexplicable subplot involving peanut butter.
Just because he was who he was, he got away with things that few other writers have managed. Who else could have written comically lowbrow reviews for Entertainment Weekly, deliberately pretentious theater criticism for the Nation, wisecracking essays on art for The Weekly Standard, and formal verse for First Things?
He was best known for the science fiction he wrote early in his career, from The Genocides in 1965 through On Wings of Song in1979. . . .
He wanted, however, to be known as a poet, even changing his byline from “Thomas M. Disch” to “Tom Disch” whenever he published his verse. His two volumes of essays about poets and poetry are the most lively of the last twenty years, and his own poetry was at its best in comic applications of fantastically difficult forms.
All in all, it was a fine career – one with which nearly any popular writer would be satisfied. And yet, it seems, in the final analysis, strangely lacking. Or lacking, at least, in the works one would expect from a talent as prodigious as Tom Disch’s. He once told me that part of the reason he quit writing science fiction was that, to deepen it into real art, “I would have to belike . . . Gene Wolfe and return to the Catholicism that I barely got away from when I was young – and I can’t do that, of course.”
There is one small inaccuracy here. After a long lapse, Disch returned to science fiction in the past few years, publishing a number of short stories (to be collected in The Wall of America (scheduled for October)) and two small novels, The Voyage of the Proteus: An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World and The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten. A posthumous novel, The Proteus Sails Again, has also been announced.
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