Thomas M. Disch – författare

Praise for Thomas Disch:"One of the most remarkably talented writers around."---Washington Post Book World"[Disch] is without doubt one of the really bright lights on the American SF scene."---Fantasy and Science FictionThis collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career, during which he has supplemented his creative output with reviews and critical essays in publications as diverse as the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Twilight Zone.Disch's perspectives on his genre are skeptical, novel, and often incendiary. The volume's opening essay, for example, characterizes writers of science fiction as "the provincials of literature." Other essays explore science fiction's roots-Poe, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Vonnegut-as well as modern practitioners such as Stephen King, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and William Gibson. Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.

Disch traces Sci-Fi's phenomenal growth from the supernatural tales of Edgar Allen Poe to the utopian dreams and technological nightmares of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, to today when it has become a multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry. While he highlights the genre's predictive successes, he emphasises its cultural role as both a lens and a medium for the very rapid changes driven by modern technology. Disch traces sci-fi's role in all aspects of modern life and explains how it has become a cultural battlefield even helping us to adjust to new social realities. But Disch is also highly critical of the genre and sees its darker expression in the appearance of suicidal UFO cults. Behind the spaceships and aliens, Disch reveals the blueprints of the dizzying postmodern future we have already begun to inhabit.