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Thomas Michael Disch
(February 2, 1940 - July 4, 2008) U.S.A.

Thomas M. Disch

Sci-fi and children's books writer

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Poet and critic, born in Des Moines, Iowa. His father was a travelling salesman, but the paternal and maternal families were Minnesota-based, and his earliest years were spent in St. Paul, before they moved to Minneapolis. In 1948 the family moved to Fairmont, MN, where he was a newspaper delivery boy and door-to-door magnetic potholder salesman. His family moved in 1953 to the Twin Cities where at three different high schools he would develop, respectively, a love for classical music and opera, an opposition to the Catholic Church, and a fascination for poetry.

After receiving his high school diploma he worked the summer of '57 as a trainee structural steel draftsman, saving up for a move to New York City. About his 18th birthday he enlisted in the army. This he found uncongenial and soon went AWOL, but returned before it became desertion, whereupon he was sent to a combination prison and mental hospital, where he had a splendid time and was discharged in May.

Poet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brighest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him.

In recent years, Disch has turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's 'Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances - what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.

He also worked under the pseudonymes Tom Disch, Tom Demijohn and Dobbin Thorpe.

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Thomas M. DischBooks:

  • The Genocides (1965)
  • Mankind Under the Leash (1966)
  • Echo Around the Bones (1967)
  • Black Alice (1968)
  • Camp Concentration (1968)
  • The Prisoner (1969)
  • 334 (1972)
  • Getting Into Death (1973)
  • Clara Reeve (1975)
  • The Brave Little Toaster (1978)
  • Neighboring Lives (1981)
  • The Business Man (1984)
  • The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1988)
  • The M.D. (1991)
  • The Priest (1994)
  • The Castle of Indolence (1995)
  • A Child's Garden of Grammar (1997)
  • The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998)
  • The Sub (1999)
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