Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction’s New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term “speculative fiction.” His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias “Camp Concentration” and “334” are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, “On Wings of Song,” a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.
— Remembering Thomas M. Disch | Salon Books
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