Thomas M. Disch

In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge is an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. The term was adopted by the Gnostics. Although a fashioner, the demiurge is not necessarily the same as the creator figure in the monotheistic sense, because the demiurge itself and the material from which the demiurge fashions the universe are both considered to be consequences of something else. Depending on the system, they may be considered to be either uncreated and eternal, or considered to be the product of some other entity.

'I am not Number 6. I am not a prisoner. I am a free man.'This is the classic novel of the TV series The Prisoner, by cult author Thomas M. Disch. First published in 1968, this new edition celebrates the long-awaited remake of the series, from ITV1 and the producers of Mad Men, starring Sir Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel.Combining the power of a great spy thriller with Orwellian science fiction, The Prisoner follows a former British secret agent who has quit the force, only to find himself trapped in an anonymous place called the Village. Known only as 'Number 6,' he struggles to maintain his identity in the face of the nameless powers-that-be, who use increasingly sophisticated and terrifying methods to extract his secrets.

These surreal, satiric stories pay a mesmerizing visit to the shadowy zone that lies between our everyday lives and a perilously tangible near-future. In "The Wall of America," the Department of Homeland Security has put up a border wall between the United States and Canada. But the NEA has plans for the wall as well, turning it into the world's largest art gallery. After the Rapture, working-class life for "A Family of the Post-Apocalypse" is not as different as one might imagine, despite the occasional plague of biker-gang locusts. Between addiction and art is "Ringtime," where a criminal is trapped in a recursive compulsion to visit other people's memories while he is forced to record his own for an eager audience. A Somali schoolgirl living in post-WWIII Minneapolis goes on a bloody crusade to rid her town of a familiar predator, one who might just be a monster, in "White Man." Vivid, starkly imagined, and strikingly articulate, this disquieting collection is a journey that skillfully straddles the line between playful absurdity and pointed irony.

Not since The Da Vinci Code! The only tome ever written by God Himself! INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS! In this compelling memoir, the first and hopefully the last of its kind, America's most divine author reveals the intimate and shocking details of His sudden elevation to the most coveted and least understood position in the universe. In early 2005 (A.D.), wearying of the world's religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold editorial sins, Thomas M. Disch took matters into His own hands and became the Deity. As controversial as it is incontrovertible, the moving true story of His awful transformation and its awesome aftermath reveals, at long last, the hidden web that links Disch, Philip K. Dick, Western wear, the Leamington Hotel, and Eternity itself. Read it in fear and trembling. But read it, or else. YOU WILL LAUGH. YOU WILL CRY. YOU WILL PRAY.

Tom Disch's first collection of poems for ten years presents a dazzling variety show of inventive wit. His serious gift for humour permeates poems by turn lyric and narrative, satirical, rebellious, ribald, uncompromising and honest. Too idiosyncratic and various a poet to belong to any poetic grouping, he is simply, in the late Donald Davie's phrase, 'consistently entertaining and intelligent'.

Praise for Thomas Disch:"One of the most remarkably talented writers around."---Washington Post Book World"[Disch] is without doubt one of the really bright lights on the American SF scene."---Fantasy and Science FictionThis collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career, during which he has supplemented his creative output with reviews and critical essays in publications as diverse as the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Twilight Zone.Disch's perspectives on his genre are skeptical, novel, and often incendiary. The volume's opening essay, for example, characterizes writers of science fiction as "the provincials of literature." Other essays explore science fiction's roots-Poe, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Vonnegut-as well as modern practitioners such as Stephen King, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and William Gibson. Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.

Praise for Thomas Disch:"One of the most remarkably talented writers around."---Washington Post Book World"[Disch] is without doubt one of the really bright lights on the American SF scene."---Fantasy and Science FictionThis collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career, during which he has supplemented his creative output with reviews and critical essays in publications as diverse as the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Twilight Zone.Disch's perspectives on his genre are skeptical, novel, and often incendiary. The volume's opening essay, for example, characterizes writers of science fiction as "the provincials of literature." Other essays explore science fiction's roots-Poe, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Vonnegut-as well as modern practitioners such as Stephen King, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and William Gibson. Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.

This collection by poet and novelist Thomas M. Disch offers a generous assortment of his writing on various literary topics, his reviews of plays and opera, and some of his poetry. The first essay, "The Future of the Book," prophesies the decline of print media and the increasing prominence of the internet and hypertext as a means of disseminating authors' work. Unlike Sven Birkerts, Disch does not mourn nostalgically the loss of Gutenberg's printing press. Rather, he speaks with playful aptness of books saturating our landfills.Next, Disch offers an essay on epic verse that juxtaposes such canonical giants as Homer and Virgil with the likes of Michael Lind and some war-inspired American novelists, including John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. He uses Harold Bloom's concept of "the anxiety of influence" as well as the ideas of the poetical voice to segue into a discussion on twentieth-century poet John Ciardi's progression from the "Capitalist of the Po-Biz" in his early career to "the Polonius of American poetry."The essay "Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry" is a scathing and witty critique of the poet as professional. Disch argues that the notion that one can subsist on one's poetry alone while escaping to the Caribbean for vacations and retreats is "grasshopperism at its most presumptuous." All in all, Disch dishes out a sumptuous platter of poems and prose that are certain to satisfy.Thomas Disch is a popular and prolific poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist. He is the author of many works of science fiction and the poetry collections Dark Verses and Light and Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems.

This spectacular novel established Thomas M. Disch as a major new force in science fiction. First published in 1965, it was immediately labeled a masterpiece reminiscent of the works of J.G. Ballard and H.G. Wells In this harrowing novel, the world's cities have been reduced to cinder and ash and alien plants have overtaken the earth. The plants, able to grow the size of maples in only a month and eventually reach six hundred feet, have commandeered the world's soil and are sucking even the Great Lakes dry. In northern Minnesota, Anderson, an aging farmer armed with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, desperately leads the reduced citizenry of a small town in a daily struggle for meager existence. Throw into this fray Jeremiah Orville, a marauding outsider bent on a bizarre and private revenge, and the fight to live becomes a daunting task.

Disch traces Sci-Fi's phenomenal growth from the supernatural tales of Edgar Allen Poe to the utopian dreams and technological nightmares of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, to today when it has become a multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry. While he highlights the genre's predictive successes, he emphasises its cultural role as both a lens and a medium for the very rapid changes driven by modern technology. Disch traces sci-fi's role in all aspects of modern life and explains how it has become a cultural battlefield even helping us to adjust to new social realities. But Disch is also highly critical of the genre and sees its darker expression in the appearance of suicidal UFO cults. Behind the spaceships and aliens, Disch reveals the blueprints of the dizzying postmodern future we have already begun to inhabit.