Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008)

This wasn't as good as I'd remembered it from previously reading it in 1990 - it was better! As a fan of the show, bringing my own associations to the text, my 5 ⭐ rating is undoubtedly objectively suspect, but that itself is in keeping with the book's themes of what we can and cannot trust, and the conditionality of reality.

Disch captured the smart, jousting dialogue just right, and created the layers of suspicion, second-guessing, cautious trust and resigned betrayals of the TV series.

His story is littered with the Shakespearean and classical references of the original, and the Bard's "Measure for Measure" forms both a plot element and a subversive meta-narrative on the role of the characters with the book, and of the writer and reader of the book. Whether the follow-up novels by two different authors will measure up to Disch's high standards remains for me to see.

Oh, and did Disch conceptualise motion-capture CGI in this 1969 novel? I think he did!… (more)

I know some readers don’t class this novel as science fiction at all—it’s not really about the future, it’s not at all about predicting the future, and so on—but I’ve reread Camp Concentration a number of times now and, for me, it’s an example of what SF can be at its very best.
    It is the near-future here (or the near-future from 1968 when Thomas Disch wrote it) and there’s a large-scale war in progress. The story itself is set inside a complex called Camp Archimedes, built deep underground in a disused goldmine and which is simultaneously both prison and research facility. Its inmates (who volunteered for this as a way of escaping life in a conventional prison or US Army brig) are human guinea-pigs deliberately infected with Pallidine, a preparation containing a bacterium derived from the one which causes syphilis. In real life, syphilis has often been linked with genius—as if the spirochaete which causes the one also somehow unleashes the other—and so it is here: “Sometimes I think maybe it wasn’t such a big mistake. I’ll say this for the stuff they gave us—it beats acid. With acid you think you know everything; with this, you goddamn well do.” There’s quite a price to pay though: in the space of just a few short months this Pallidine not only raises your IQ to genius level—it also kills you.
    Into this antechamber of Hell comes poet Louis Sacchetti, jailed as a conscientious objector to the ongoing war, then transferred to Archimedes and assigned the task of keeping a journal as an additional, independent and more subjective record of the experiment as it proceeds. By the time he arrives, some of the inmates have been there for months already and, as their minds soar, are very close to death. And they seem to be wasting their genius: the aim of the programme was to devise entirely new kinds of weaponry for the military, yet the prisoners seem to have become obsessed with … alchemy. Yes, this is what Sacchetti stumbles into: Camp A’s collective genius is being frittered away on concocting an Elixir of Everlasting Life, on attempting to cheat death using alchemy.
    I love everything about this book. For a start, there’s the richness and imagery of Disch’s prose (his journalist Louis Sacchetti is a published poet). Then there’s the subterranean setting: laboratory-like, hermetic, a former goldmine. In fact there’s a lot of alchemical symbolism, but just as in medieval Europe where alchemy was sometimes a cover, a harmless-looking front for more covert experimentations, so too here. Much of the medieval version, too, was really about the transformation, not of base metals into gold, but of the alchemist.
    Camp Archimedes also resembles a stage—claustrophobic, artificial, the prisoners’ every word and deed minutely scrutinised—and the play being acted out on its boards is familiar enough: selling your soul to Satan in exchange for knowledge and all that. But, with the liquid gold of Pallidine coursing through your veins, might you become cunning enough to outwit even the Devil?… (more)