With great sadness I announce the death of Thomas Disch. I only met him in person twice, fifteen years ago and early this year. But he was a huge influence on me and I am proud to say he was my friend. As a poet, he was the Alexander Pope of our era, satirizing the follies of society and the pretenses and blindnesses of culture with savage perceptiveness. There should be other poets like him, but he was one of a kind. He wrote at least two of the finest novels in science fiction, Camp Concentration and 334. The novel he wrote with Charlie, Neighboring Lives, is a superb fictional portrait of the Victorian intelligentsia. His critical prose was incomparably vivid and precise. The absence of his talent, vital to the end, hurts our literature. His death hurts me. - Fred Pollack
|