Under Compulsion

by Thomas M. Disch

Vintage paperback

Genres: Science Fiction, Collections, Fiction, German Literature, Short Stories

170 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Poet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him; both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works.

In later years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances -- what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much a collection of seventeen short science fiction stories from a writer of whom I had never heard before. The stories were better than I expected and was worth the time spent in reading them.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

some excellent stories here - especially the Casablanca one.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most short story collections this was a mixed bag, with a few good stories and some that were average or just forgettable. At his best, Disch is an excellent writer with few equals in the SF genre. Very pessmistic and literary.

"The Roaches" (hilarious and disgusting) "Descending" (a nightmare about an infinite stairwell) and "Casablanca" were all great. The latter is an unusual take on a nuclear apocalypse: an American couple on holiday in Morocco is stranded when the United States is basically wiped out overnight. What follows is dark and very realistic.

My favourite is the very short story "Fun With Your New Head" (which is also an alternative title for this collection in some editions). It is a story in the form of an advertisement promoting the new and improved "Head" (i.e. humans) as an entertaining toy for aliens. Unique, bizarre and disturbing.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this collection of strange, dark stories by Thomas Disch. A couple of the shorter stories feel like experiments that don't always work, but the best stories here more than make up for it. My favourites are Casablanca, where American tourists find their privilege evaporates in a cloud of smoke on holiday in Morocco, Come to Venus Melancholy, a tale of isolation, despair and human/cyborg gender relations, and 1-A, a brutal description of life in the army. The author describes the madness and despair of enforced solitude amazingly well, and that comes across in several of these stories. I believe this is more or less the same collection of stories as Fun with your New Head, perhaps with different edits but the same core collection of stories. Highly recommended.

[Alvaro Zinos-Amaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brutal collection of early Disch stories--grim, claustrophobic, desperate and despairing, but also brilliantly crafted, beautiful, and shot through with black humor.

My British edition starts with "The Roaches", "Come to Venus Melancholy", and "Linda and Daniel and Spike"--an unrelenting, devastating trifecta. Other knockouts: "Descending", "The Number You Have Reached", and "Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism."

These are haunting masterpieces. I am now haunted and have been piece-mastered.

[Gregoire · Rating 3 out of 5]

une série de 17 nouvelles caustiques qui marquent le lecteur de leur vision pessimisme sur la nature humaine d'après DISCH

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

some cool funny stories. very black sense of humor