Thomas Disch

Novelist, poet and critic

Born: 2 February, 1940, in Des Moines, Iowa.
Died: 4 July, 2008, in New York, aged 68.

THOMAS Disch was an author, poet and critic who twisted the already twisted genre of science fiction in new, disturbing directions, including writing his last book in the voice of God.

Disch's work was voluminous and included many forms and genres. In addition to writing speculative fiction (his preferred term for science fiction), he wrote poetry from light to lyric to dramatic; realist fiction, children's fiction and historical fiction; opera librettos and plays; criticism of theatre, films and art; and even a video game.

One of Disch's best-known works is The Brave Little Toaster: A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances (1986), in which a toaster, a clock radio and an electric blanket come to life.

But it was as an exemplar of a generation of more sophisticated, better-educated science-fiction writers who emerged in the 1960s that Disch first stood out. His dark themes, disturbing plots, corrosive social commentary and sheer unpredictability made him a leader of what was called "the new wave" of science-fiction writers, those who consciously wrote literature rather than disposable pulp entertainment.

"You could finally write for grown-ups." Disch said in 2001 in an interview with Strange Horizons, an online speculative fiction magazine.

Dana Gioia, the chairman of the United States National Endowment for the Arts, said: "The reason his science fiction is important is that he combined a kind of really dark Swiftian satire with a modernist, really postmodernist sensibility."

Arguably the three most highly regarded novels by Disch are Camp Concentration (1968), which tells of political prisoners who are being treated with a new drug that increases their intelligence, but also causes their early deaths; 334 (1972), which describes a New York City housing project that has sunk to depressing depths in 2023 and On Wings of Song (1979), which chronicles an Iowan who travels to New York and encounters a similar hell.

Thomas Michael Disch was born in Des Moines in 1940. His father sold magazines, encyclopaedias and Quonset huts door to door, and the family moved to Minnesota when Thomas was eight. By the time they moved to St Paul, five years later, Thomas had begun to fill tablets with future histories of galactic empires.

After falling in love with Shakespeare and graduating from high school in 1957, Disch worked at low-paying jobs like night watchman at a funeral home. He moved to New York, where more low-paying jobs followed, including writing copy for an advertising agency and carrying a spear at the Metropolitan Opera. He dropped out of New York University after he sold a short story for $112.50.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Disch used classic thriller techniques in his "Supernatural Minnesota" series, in which he combined the macabre with science fiction to expose the corruption of various occupations, including businessman, doctor, priest and teacher. Priests in The Priest (1994) take the biggest hit: pregnant teenagers are imprisoned and killed by mad clergymen.

"The Priest deserves consideration as the purest Gothic novel of the 20th century," the St James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers stated.

Disch's poems were known for their technical craft, rejection of obvious sentimentality and unusual subjects. How to Behave When Dead prescribed etiquette for the interred.

His criticism appeared in the Nation, the New York Daily News, the New York Sun and elsewhere. He wrote a series of poems on grammar, for which he was a stickler, including one on auxiliary verbs. He antagonised some science fiction fans by writing a book in 1998 criticising the genre for encouraging people to believe in things like UFOs.

This year, Disch published The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten, a novel in which he used his idea of God's voice. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, he said this device meant he could speak nonsense and it would be true.

A friend, Alice Turner, said Disch shot himself. She and other friends told how his apartment had been devastated by a fire; then his partner of more than 30 years died; then his home in Barryville, New York State, was flooded; and finally, he faced eviction after he returned to the apartment. He also suffered from diabetes and sciatica.

"He was simply ground down by the sequence of catastrophes," another friend, the novelist Norman Rush, said.

Thomas Disch's partner of more than 30 years, Charles Naylor, a poet, died in 2005. Disch is survived by his three brothers and a sister.