Thomas M. Disch Libri

In his seventh novel, Disch reaches a literary high point in the field of science fiction. At once hilarious and frightening, it follows Daniel Weinreb as he attempts to escape the repressive laws and atmosphere of the isolationist State of Iowa. A rich black comedy of bizarre sexual ambiguity and adventurism.

In this speculative fiction, Thomas M. Disch depicts an alternate 1970s where America is at war with the world and its citizens. Louis Sacchetti, a poet imprisoned for draft resistance, becomes a witness to brutal military experiments at Camp Archimedes, where a drug called Pallidine enhances intelligence but leads to death.

If Charles Dickens has written speculative fiction, he might have created a novel as intricate, passionate, and lacerating as Thomas M. Disch's visionary portrait of the underbelly of 21st-century New York City. The residents of the public housing project at 334 East 11th Street live in a world of rationed babies and sanctioned drug addiction. Real food is displayed in museums and hospital attendants moonlight as body-snatchers. Nimbly hopscotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an aging matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 334 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.

Since its colonization by Earth, Pacifica has flourished. Now, under the guidance of Chairman Carlotta Madigan and her lover and Minister of Media, Royce Lindbold, it is the galaxy's supreme electronic democracy, a Utopian world where both sexes equally serve and are served by the Media. But there are those who would have it otherwise, who have come to Pacifica to turn its very freedom into an instrument of its bondage, who have launched a devastating media war on Pacifica to divide... and conquer.

Bob was the happiest man in the world. His wife was dead, and no one suspected him of the murder. His mother-in-law was dying, and would probably leave him an inheritance. With both of them gone, Bob could live the good life. But then Bob's wife came back from the grave . . . and she brought her mother with her.