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Author: Gregory Feeley

Thomas M. Disch: Love and Nonexistence

Thomas M. Disch: Love and Nonexistence


334 by Thomas M. Disch (Avon, October 1974). Cover artist unknown

In the last page of Thomas M. Disch’s novel 334, the family matriarch, Mrs. Hansen, has finished explaining why she should have the right to die. “I’ve made sense, haven’t I? I’ve been rational?” she asks her unseen auditor, a civil servant taking an application. “They’re all good reasons, every one of them. I checked them in your little book.” She has indeed given reasons why her life is no longer worth living, with disconcerting thoroughness, and makes clear that if her application is turned down, she will appeal. “I dream about it. And I think about it. And it’s what I want.”

What is remarkable about this scene is not the defense of suicide (which does not take place in the text — the book ends with Mrs. Hansen’s summation), but an articulated yearning for nonexistence. The three elements of this nexus — the voiced eloquence, the fiercely focused desire, and the prospect of nothingness — constitute three compass points of Disch’s art. There is a fourth, always present but harder to see, which we will come to in a moment. For now, let us consider these elements, vividly present throughout Disch’s fiction and widely remarked upon, but also widely misunderstood, especially in the SF genre, where he began his career and which he never fully left.

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The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

The Fantastic Novels of Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison speaking to the audience at the Los Angeles
Science Fantasy Society, May 1982. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta

Harlan Ellison published three novels early in his career, and spent the rest of his life trying to complete another1. Despite a large and successful body of work, and the willingness of publishers to pay large advances for a novel, he never succeeded.

Returning to the novel form was important for Ellison; he announced the titles of works in progress as “forthcoming” in the front matter of his short story collections, ghost titles that would appear in successive volumes, sometimes for years, then vanish to be replaced by new ones. In 2010, when he was 76 and announced he was dying, Ellison said that he was working on a new novel, The Man Who Looked for Sweetness;2 and in 2014, shortly before he suffered the stroke that ended his writing, he returned to an earlier project.3 Completing another novel was a dream he never relinquished.

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