Fascinating, Maddening. Well worth reading.
Usually with short story collections, my score is an average of the love/hates for each individual story, adjusted a little, up or down, to reflect the overall impact of the whole collection. Here, I just said, to heck with it, and adjusted it right up to 5* -- yes, there are mis-steps here, and no, I didn't "love" every single story. But this is Thomas M. Disch: The mis-steps are as interesting as the hits, every word reflecting the complications of Disch as a writer, and as such are just as valuable as the gems.
I picked up this collection because I was haunted by Disch's 1967 story "Casablanca" which I read as a teenager, 50 or so years ago. How's that for sticking power? It has lost none of its power. In fact, in early 2020, as tourists faced the grim prospect of being stranded, by airline collapses and countries closing their borders, in increasingly inhospitable luxury destinations, it has acquired a real, terrifying crystal-ball quality -- This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but by being unable to cash your travellers checks ...
I liked Disch's SF and Fantasy stories well enough: "White Fang Goes Dingo," "Assassin & Son," and "Bodies," are very readable, and the world-building is impressive, but I wasn't blown away by them. I always feel that (with some notable exceptions) genre short stories can be disappointing, like tasters or trial runs for full-length novels (and sometimes, as with "White Fang," they are). But I especially liked "Et in Arcadia Ego" because it was a such a clever pastiche of a whole sub-genre of SF, neatly rolling up into a few wicked pages the themes and imagery and backstory that other, lesser authors grind out into thousand-pages novels and endless series.
If there were any justice in this world, Thomas M. Disch would be more of a household name. As it is, I can only recommend that everyone who cares about good writing -- and good genre writing -- should track down a battered old ex-library copy of this collection, and read it for themselves ...
Usually with short story collections, my score is an average of the love/hates for each individual story, adjusted a little, up or down, to reflect the overall impact of the whole collection. Here, I just said, to heck with it, and adjusted it right up to 5* -- yes, there are mis-steps here, and no, I didn't "love" every single story. But this is Thomas M. Disch: The mis-steps are as interesting as the hits, every word reflecting the complications of Disch as a writer, and as such are just as valuable as the gems.
I picked up this collection because I was haunted by Disch's 1967 story "Casablanca" which I read as a teenager, 50 or so years ago. How's that for sticking power? It has lost none of its power. In fact, in early 2020, as tourists faced the grim prospect of being stranded, by airline collapses and countries closing their borders, in increasingly inhospitable luxury destinations, it has acquired a real, terrifying crystal-ball quality -- This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but by being unable to cash your travellers checks ...
I liked Disch's SF and Fantasy stories well enough: "White Fang Goes Dingo," "Assassin & Son," and "Bodies," are very readable, and the world-building is impressive, but I wasn't blown away by them. I always feel that (with some notable exceptions) genre short stories can be disappointing, like tasters or trial runs for full-length novels (and sometimes, as with "White Fang," they are). But I especially liked "Et in Arcadia Ego" because it was a such a clever pastiche of a whole sub-genre of SF, neatly rolling up into a few wicked pages the themes and imagery and backstory that other, lesser authors grind out into thousand-pages novels and endless series.
If there were any justice in this world, Thomas M. Disch would be more of a household name. As it is, I can only recommend that everyone who cares about good writing -- and good genre writing -- should track down a battered old ex-library copy of this collection, and read it for themselves ...
