Bad Moon Rising: An Anthology of Political Forebodings

by Thomas M. Disch (Editor), Peter Schjeldahl, Marilyn Hacker

Genres: Short Stories

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bad Moon Rising was an excellent (if little-known) anthology that didn't seem to find its audience. It seemed a very literary book, and the science fiction field took little notice of it; I don't believe there was ever a paperback edition. Subtitled "An Anthology of Political Foreboding," it contains mostly dystopian stories about ecological doom and political malfeasance, most of which fell short of the mark of pessimism compared to what became the reality the world experienced in the years that were forecast. John Sladek's story The Great Wall of Mexico seems particularly prescient. The book contains some poetry (notable ones from Marilyn Hacker, who was married to Samuel R. Delany), and very good stories by Kate Wilhelm, Michael Moorcock, Carol Emshwiller, Gene Wolfe, Robert Silverberg, and Kit Reed. I most enjoyed the contributions from George Alec Effinger, and Harlan Ellison's The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.

[pattrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it sometimes eerie to read these science fiction stories, some of them prescient, from the early 1970s. The incipient eco-awareness, which even then felt urgent to some of the writers in this anthology, is particularly (should I say tragically?) touching after 40 more years of not-enough people listening.

But mostly I am writing this review to say that the two tales by Geoff Alec Effinger that collectively go by the title of Two Sadnesses very well may be the saddest things I've ever read.

For that alone, 5 stars.