Author of &#8220;The Genocides&#8221; commits suicide
<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>
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<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
<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>
