{"id":11294,"date":"2008-07-09T09:01:16","date_gmt":"2008-07-09T16:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/07\/09\/11294.html"},"modified":"2008-07-09T09:01:16","modified_gmt":"2008-07-09T16:01:16","slug":"rip-thomas-m-disch-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/07\/09\/rip-thomas-m-disch-1\/","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P., Thomas M. Disch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I imagine most of you who would want to know already know by now that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/07\/08\/books\/08disch.html\">Thomas M. Disch<\/a> committed suicide a few days ago.<\/p>\n<p>Disch was one of my favorite authors in high school. I still have a high regard for a lot of his work--I think I read most of his fiction (and a little of his nonfiction) that was published before 1980 or so. Somehow I never got around to reading his later work; not sure why. But anyone looking for an introduction to his short fiction could do worse than to dig up a used copy of <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/www.isfdb.org\/cgi-bin\/pl.cgi?FNDMNTLD19XX\">Fundamental Disch<\/a><\/cite>. I always had a particular fondness for \"Dangerous Flags,\" though it's certainly not a Deep or Significant story; just short and fun.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, Disch later criticized some of that early work as \"juvenilia.\" But fwiw, I still consider it worth reading.<\/p>\n<p>He was, I think, the second author who we did an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2001\/20010730\/\">author focus issue<\/a> on; we reprinted a story, two poems, and some nonfiction by him, and we added a review of the then-new Vintage reissues of a couple of his books, plus an interview with him (conducted by then-Articles-editor David Horwich, who I think was a big Disch fan). That last was quoted in the abovelinked <cite>New York Times<\/cite> obituary; thanks to all who dropped me notes about it. (I assume that the <cite>Times<\/cite> writer just Googled Disch's name; that interview was relatively high in search results.)<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.locusmag.com\/2008\/Disch_Obit.html\"><cite>Locus<\/cite> obituary<\/a> notes that Disch had two books out in the past year, with a collection coming from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tachyonpublications.com\/\">Tachyon<\/a> this October; maybe I'll check them out.<\/p>\n<p>It sounds like things had been pretty rough for him lately, but I'm sad to see him go.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I imagine most of you who would want to know already know by now that Thomas M. Disch committed suicide&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,27,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death","category-speculative-fiction","category-writers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}