Signed
Camp Concentration
Inscribed first edition, 1968
Camp Concentration (1968) by Thomas M. Disch is among the more intellectually demanding works to emerge from the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s. Set in a near-future United States still grinding through a war in Southeast Asia, the novel is narrated through the journal of Louis Sacchetti, a poet and conscientious objector imprisoned for draft resistance. Sacchetti is abruptly transferred from a conventional federal prison to the classified Camp Archimedes, where he discovers that his fellow inmates are being injected with "Pallidine," a modified spirochete derived from the syphilis-causing Treponema pallidum. The organism accelerates intelligence to extraordinary levels. It also kills its hosts in roughly nine months. The novel draws on Faustian literature, alchemy, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (which serves as epigraph and structural touchstone) to construct an allegory about the state's exploitation of minds it deems expendable.
Inscribed copy. This copy is a signed and inscribed by Disch on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in red cloth boards with gold lettering on spine. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (56). ISBN: 0246973528. #10133.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket with minor wear to extremities. Nice copy of an uncommon title.
Inscribed copy. This copy is a signed and inscribed by Disch on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in red cloth boards with gold lettering on spine. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (56). ISBN: 0246973528. #10133.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket with minor wear to extremities. Nice copy of an uncommon title.
Additional Details
Camp Concentration is structured as a prison journal, narrated by Louis Sacchetti, a poet imprisoned for refusing the draft during a war that is unnamed but unmistakably Vietnam-era. He is transferred without explanation to Camp Archimedes, an underground facility somewhere in the mountain states, luxuriously appointed and utterly sealed from the outside world. The administrator, General Haast, is cordial and evasive. He wants Sacchetti to keep writing. The setup is sinister in the way bureaucratic pleasantness tends to be.
What Sacchetti discovers is that the camp's population consists of prisoners deemed expendable by the government, most of them convicted criminals or political detainees. They have all been infected with Pallidine, a lab-modified spirochete closely related to the organism that causes syphilis. The pathogen's effect on the brain mimics, in accelerated form, the neurosyphilitic changes historically associated with certain creative and intellectual figures. The camp's physician explains the logic directly: neuro-syphilis has, in some documented cases, preceded or accompanied periods of exceptional creative output. Pallidine was engineered to isolate and amplify this effect. The result is a population of rapidly-developing geniuses who will be dead within months.
Mordecai Washington, a young Black man whose intelligence, even before Pallidine, clearly outpaces the institution holding him, becomes the camp's organizing force, its schemer and its philosopher. He is also the novel's most overtly Faustian figure. Disch openly credits the novel's literary debts. The epigraph from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress frames the entire narrative as allegory. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which a composer contracts syphilis to unlock creative power, is a direct precursor. The dedication to John Sladek and Thomas Mann announces these affiliations.
Sacchetti manages to resist infection, at least in body, for much of the novel. His resistance is moral and temperamental rather than biological. As the other prisoners' minds expand and their bodies deteriorate, Sacchetti's journal becomes less stable, less certain of the boundary between observer and participant. Late in the novel, the entries grow more fragmented, the handwriting changes (noted editorially), and the writing itself starts to come apart.
The resolution hinges on the truth behind Modicai's alchemical language circulating through the camp. It is actually a cipher designed to conceal from the surveillance systems a genuine effort involving the transfer of human consciousness. In Sacchetti's final journal entries, he describes waking in a body that is no longer dying, in someone else's flesh. The relief is real. So is the strangeness. As he writes near the close: "The poison has had not two effects — genius and death — but one. Call it by which name you will."
Camp Concentration appeared in New Worlds magazine in serialized form beginning in 1967 before its book publication in 1968. Its emergence in that context is significant. Michael Moorcock's New Worlds was then the primary outlet for science fiction that rejected genre conventions in favor of literary experimentation. Disch, along with J.G. Ballard, John Sladek, and Pamela Zoline, represented the American wing of this movement, and Camp Concentration remains one of its more bold achievements, well outside the genre's mainstream of that period.
What Sacchetti discovers is that the camp's population consists of prisoners deemed expendable by the government, most of them convicted criminals or political detainees. They have all been infected with Pallidine, a lab-modified spirochete closely related to the organism that causes syphilis. The pathogen's effect on the brain mimics, in accelerated form, the neurosyphilitic changes historically associated with certain creative and intellectual figures. The camp's physician explains the logic directly: neuro-syphilis has, in some documented cases, preceded or accompanied periods of exceptional creative output. Pallidine was engineered to isolate and amplify this effect. The result is a population of rapidly-developing geniuses who will be dead within months.
Mordecai Washington, a young Black man whose intelligence, even before Pallidine, clearly outpaces the institution holding him, becomes the camp's organizing force, its schemer and its philosopher. He is also the novel's most overtly Faustian figure. Disch openly credits the novel's literary debts. The epigraph from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress frames the entire narrative as allegory. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which a composer contracts syphilis to unlock creative power, is a direct precursor. The dedication to John Sladek and Thomas Mann announces these affiliations.
Sacchetti manages to resist infection, at least in body, for much of the novel. His resistance is moral and temperamental rather than biological. As the other prisoners' minds expand and their bodies deteriorate, Sacchetti's journal becomes less stable, less certain of the boundary between observer and participant. Late in the novel, the entries grow more fragmented, the handwriting changes (noted editorially), and the writing itself starts to come apart.
The resolution hinges on the truth behind Modicai's alchemical language circulating through the camp. It is actually a cipher designed to conceal from the surveillance systems a genuine effort involving the transfer of human consciousness. In Sacchetti's final journal entries, he describes waking in a body that is no longer dying, in someone else's flesh. The relief is real. So is the strangeness. As he writes near the close: "The poison has had not two effects — genius and death — but one. Call it by which name you will."
Camp Concentration appeared in New Worlds magazine in serialized form beginning in 1967 before its book publication in 1968. Its emergence in that context is significant. Michael Moorcock's New Worlds was then the primary outlet for science fiction that rejected genre conventions in favor of literary experimentation. Disch, along with J.G. Ballard, John Sladek, and Pamela Zoline, represented the American wing of this movement, and Camp Concentration remains one of its more bold achievements, well outside the genre's mainstream of that period.
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