ouis Sacchetti is a conscientious objector in an alternate 1970s where the United States is fighting, but necessarily winning, a vague and prolonged war. Like all "conchies," Louis is sitting out the conflict in prison, preferring to spend five years in jail rather than condone the slaughter of his fellow humans. But one day Sacchetti is inexplicably taken--by limousine, no less--from his run-of-the-mill prison to a secret corporate research facility. "I am being held prisoner!" he writes in his journal. "I have been kidnapped from the prison where I by law belong and brought to a prison in which I do not belong."
Sacchetti soon learns that he is being held in Camp Archimedes, and that his journal is part of the reason. It seems General Humphrey Haast, the enigmatic and unstable head of the Archimedes project, needs someone to observe and interpret an ongoing experiment into human intelligence. Sacchetti's impressive writing talents, along with his background as a poet and a scholar, make him the perfect reporter for this assignment. In fact, he was brought to the prison at the request of Mordecai Washington, an inmate at Archimedes who once went to school with Sacchetti.
Through Sacchetti's journal, readers discover that "Camp A." is no ordinary prison. Inmates can have anything (but their freedom) simply by asking, and they are all hyperintelligent. But their super intellects come at a price, in this case the deadly side effects of a drug called Pallidine. Although the brain power of Archimedes is ostensibly being bred to create new weapons of war, Haast has the inmates focused on the ancient art of alchemy in an attempt to discover an elixir of immortality. And in this the prisoners are well motivated, for their own lives depend on their success.
The affliction of genius
Camp Concentration was first published in 1968 and has recently been brought back into print by Vintage Books. It is generally classified as a so-called "New Wave" SF novel, though Disch himself has said he has little use for the term. The book is both well known and highly regarded among the science fiction cognoscenti, but it has never achieved the critical mass of a "classic" novel. That's likely due in part to its somewhat dense philosophical discussions, which have enough references to Faust and St. Augustine to make it seem as if readers lacking at least one Ph.D. are missing out on something.
But that's not to say Disch's intellectually rich prose is at all out of place. In fact, he does an excellent job of making the book feel as though it's the journal of a poet chronicling the affliction of genius on the inmates of Camp A. In this capacity, the narrator does an excellent job of bringing the day-to-day events of this unusual prison to life. And the book moves along nicely despite its somewhat dense subject matter, in part because Sacchetti is subject to the same hopes and fears as the rest of humanity, even though he is far more intelligent (and not particularly afraid of showing it, despite his attempts at humility) than most.
Although the ending of Camp Concentration has been criticized for relying too heavily on common SF tropes, Disch and Sacchetti manage to wrap things up smartly, if a bit quickly. There are revelations of both plot and character, and the actors in this particular play seem to have grown a bit, taking readers along with them. The book is not only an enjoyable read but a satisfying one, and though readers may not be able to pin down what exactly, they will likely feel as if they have learned something by the last page.
ew York City in the 2020s: Birdie Ludd strives to raise his
government-assigned "score" high enough to be allowed to have children. Ab, a
morgue attendant at Bellevue Hospital, sells cadavers to a necrophilia broker.
Alexa takes the drug Morbihnine to help her more fully visualize the fantasy
life she leads in the late Roman Empire. Meanwhile,
Little Mister Kissy Lips and his gang of young teens plan a murder in the
Battery.
What do these people have in common? They either live in or are associated
in some way with a government housing project at 334 East 11th Street. The
project's residents are, in general, impoverished, often unemployed and
sometimes squalid. But they are not universally downtrodden. Some are happy
with their lives. The deeply introspective stories in this book--connected
loosely by geography or acquaintance--study the hopes and disappointments of
these people.
And study them with a very lyrical style, it should be noted. Hardly
surprising, since in addition to being a novelist, Disch is an internationally
famous poet.
The first half 334 contains four short stories that are traditional
in the sense that they have central characters striving toward a goal. The
second half, called "334," is an extended tapestry of vignettes that continue
the tales of many of the characters introduced in the first half. These short
pieces are interleaved like a shuffled deck of cards. They jump back and forth
in time, and from character to character, but luckily Disch provides a sort of
map in the beginning that charts the narrative's course through time and space.
It's all very postmodern.
Halfway to the future
334 was originally published in 1974 and is another of Disch's books that's lumped in with the United Kingdom's "New Wave" movement. Which is a way of saying that the focus of this novel is on people rather than technology or ideas.
Because 334 doesn't focus on big machines, big events, or the effects of new technologies or ideas on the broad canvas of society, it doesn't
scream, "Science fiction!" (even though it is definitely a book about future times). Also, the characters are not the sort generally found in SF. They aren't starship captains, soldiers, or scientists, but working-class people (if they have jobs at all) with troubles on a personal, not an interstellar, scale.
Closer examination, though, reveals that these stories are indeed science fiction, and in fact they may be stronger, deeper SF than many of the
starship-splashed books that line store shelves today. These characters'
concerns are small, yes, but they are honest and heartfelt. Their stories are
good literature, but they are also inextricably linked to technology.
Disch's world of 2020 isn't just a pretext used to shock readers, but rather
a thoroughly imagined future. His themes are familiar--family, work, love--but the details are not. Birdie Ludd, mentioned above, is held back from having children not by medical problems, but by a government-regulated eugenics project. Eventually he joins the army to earn the right to reproduce.
Genetic testing, population pressure, joblessness: these are the worries
of the early 21st century as seen from the 1970s, yet they are issues in
the forefront of today's headlines. It's interesting to think that in
choosing to extrapolate on a smaller, more personal level, Disch
visualized a future that appears, halfway there, to be dead-on.
