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Armed Camps
A nightmare glimpse of the future as seen through the eyes of two people reacting in wildly opposite ways to the violence in and around them.
- GenresScience Fiction
189 pages, ebook
First published September 1, 1969
74 people want to read
About the author
Kit Reed
194 books53 followersKit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.
Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.
Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 6, 2015
Armed Camps by Kit Reed was originally published in 1969 and it is set in the near future (i.e. some unspecified time after 1969, but before 2002.) The story is an alternating first person point of view narrative told by Danny, a former soldier who is being horribly punished for some unknown (to the reader) crime, and Anne, a woman who experiences a major mental breakdown in the beginning of the book and spends the remainder of the story trying to put the pieces back together. In this vision of the future, the United States has been locked in a state of constant war for years (decades?) and this has taken a major toll on the country. Moral is very low among the public, the economic impacts of constant war seem to be gutting the country, and most young men who are able to fight are drafted, many never to return.
This was a different sort of novel from what I’ve been reading. The story is clearly making an anti-Vietnam War statement and has a strong social message. Since I wasn’t alive at the time, I only have history lessons to guide me and suspect some of the Vietnam specific messages and symbolism of this book may have gone over my head. I had some difficulty getting started with this book because it was hard to tell what was going on in the beginning. Anne is her least sane as the book opens, and the details of Danny’s punishment are opaque initially . On the positive side, this book has the best executed alternating first person point of view narrator scheme I’ve ever encountered, and the ending was an unexpected reveal. Overall, I liked this book, I thought it was well written with an interesting message.
This was a different sort of novel from what I’ve been reading. The story is clearly making an anti-Vietnam War statement and has a strong social message. Since I wasn’t alive at the time, I only have history lessons to guide me and suspect some of the Vietnam specific messages and symbolism of this book may have gone over my head. I had some difficulty getting started with this book because it was hard to tell what was going on in the beginning. Anne is her least sane as the book opens, and the details of Danny’s punishment are opaque initially . On the positive side, this book has the best executed alternating first person point of view narrator scheme I’ve ever encountered, and the ending was an unexpected reveal. Overall, I liked this book, I thought it was well written with an interesting message.
June 26, 2021
It is remarkably unfair how obscure this little dystopian novel is; this book deserves better than to be relegated to a cheap paperback with Kent cigarette advertisements inserted in the center. The prose is of high quality, the concept is original, and the effect is powerful. I originally purchased it because I liked the cover art, no other reason. One of the few good decisions I've ever made...
June 27, 2021
Five things worth noting about "Armed Camps":
1) The temptation to overrate this book is strong, but so is this book.
2) If they aren't already, the editors at NYRB should look into reissuing it as they did other nearly lost SF like "The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe".
3) That this was written as an anti-Vietnam War piece has not aged it at all; if anything, its relevance has only grown with time.
4) Kit Reed died in 2017. Why is it that I keep discovering great authors only right after their deaths?
5) Someone once said of a Firesign Theatre album: "Horrifying, death-dealing, life-enhancing." Prime words to describe this.
1) The temptation to overrate this book is strong, but so is this book.
2) If they aren't already, the editors at NYRB should look into reissuing it as they did other nearly lost SF like "The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe".
3) That this was written as an anti-Vietnam War piece has not aged it at all; if anything, its relevance has only grown with time.
4) Kit Reed died in 2017. Why is it that I keep discovering great authors only right after their deaths?
5) Someone once said of a Firesign Theatre album: "Horrifying, death-dealing, life-enhancing." Prime words to describe this.
February 16, 2008
the first and best anti-vietnam-war science fiction novel
January 12, 2021
The style is a bit stream-of-consciousness, so be forewarned. The story is too absurd to be realistic, but not absurd enough to count as satire. Will future wars really be carried out as duels between flamethrower-wielding commandos? As early as the 1980s?
Obviously a response to the Vietnam War, this captures the exasperation of regular people in the face of the military-industrial complex of the Pentagon papers era and the yearning for something different by the millions of anti-war and anti-nuke demonstrators. I can see this story being useful in a sociology class about the time period.
The leader of the peace village is the most compelling character. It is no spoiler to pronounce him doomed, as it should be clear from the first words he says that he is doomed. Peace? There's no money in it, friend.
I think the complicity of the lumpen proletariat Reed pinpoints in this story, the contempt with which a man of peace is regarded, is very much at work right now in the broken democracy of the United States: these are the anti-maskers, the plague-deniers, the election conspiracy peddlers, the race war panic promulgators...I can only wish Reed had committed to the bit and presented a more convincing satirical base for her story, and stepped back from the stream of consciousness technique. A wider, broader story would have been as pertinent today as it was in 1969.
Obviously a response to the Vietnam War, this captures the exasperation of regular people in the face of the military-industrial complex of the Pentagon papers era and the yearning for something different by the millions of anti-war and anti-nuke demonstrators. I can see this story being useful in a sociology class about the time period.
The leader of the peace village is the most compelling character. It is no spoiler to pronounce him doomed, as it should be clear from the first words he says that he is doomed. Peace? There's no money in it, friend.
I think the complicity of the lumpen proletariat Reed pinpoints in this story, the contempt with which a man of peace is regarded, is very much at work right now in the broken democracy of the United States: these are the anti-maskers, the plague-deniers, the election conspiracy peddlers, the race war panic promulgators...I can only wish Reed had committed to the bit and presented a more convincing satirical base for her story, and stepped back from the stream of consciousness technique. A wider, broader story would have been as pertinent today as it was in 1969.
November 23, 2025
(19 November, 2025)
A deranged little girl and a delusional soldier, that's pretty much all of it. Anne is useless and her mutterings are infuriating. She wants to be heard but it ain't happening, and it never will! Danny is like all soldiers, enlisting for indoctrinated ideologies, or family traditions. Dumb as fuck, only at the end does he understand (stupid as it is!).
These two are pawns and they will only ever be pawns, one of her class, the other of his government. Unthinking drones both, but that is what society (id est us) wants, right? So... good for them, I guess.
Reed's prose is dry and dryer, there is no respite. It feels streamy - and this is not a compliment - just words strung out with very little purpose. Her comments on humanity are interesting and worthy of much study and reflection, but they are all buried under two very dull protagonists and their idle musings.
A deranged little girl and a delusional soldier, that's pretty much all of it. Anne is useless and her mutterings are infuriating. She wants to be heard but it ain't happening, and it never will! Danny is like all soldiers, enlisting for indoctrinated ideologies, or family traditions. Dumb as fuck, only at the end does he understand (stupid as it is!).
These two are pawns and they will only ever be pawns, one of her class, the other of his government. Unthinking drones both, but that is what society (id est us) wants, right? So... good for them, I guess.
Reed's prose is dry and dryer, there is no respite. It feels streamy - and this is not a compliment - just words strung out with very little purpose. Her comments on humanity are interesting and worthy of much study and reflection, but they are all buried under two very dull protagonists and their idle musings.
April 20, 2020
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
4.5/5
"Kit Reed’s first SF novel Armed Camps (1969) is all about characters constructing narratives and conjuring visions in order to keep the aphotic tides of societal disintegration at bay. The two paralleled narratives — a woman (Anne) running from her past and a man (Danny March) slowly recounting what led to his own downfall — are two different ways of fighting off what is bound to come. An oppressive melancholy that never lifts [...]"
4.5/5
"Kit Reed’s first SF novel Armed Camps (1969) is all about characters constructing narratives and conjuring visions in order to keep the aphotic tides of societal disintegration at bay. The two paralleled narratives — a woman (Anne) running from her past and a man (Danny March) slowly recounting what led to his own downfall — are two different ways of fighting off what is bound to come. An oppressive melancholy that never lifts [...]"
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews