Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
184 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1967
As part of my prep for a future episode of the podcast meant to debate the best SF novels of 1968, I had to read this novel. I know that sounds like punishment the way I worded it. This novel and 334 by Disch have been on my list to read for a long time. Weird new wave SF from the 60s is pretty much my jam, so I expected to like it.
The concept is not totally original as Flowers for Algernon became a classic, and you would not be wrong to point out how similar the plots are. Disch spins this yarn with a similar concept but reflects the dark fears of the era.
It is considered a new-wave classic so it makes sense that we would read it and debate in the Patheon of 1968, a tough year on planet Earth, but a great year for the Science fiction made on said planet. This book should stand alone in this review. If you want to hear my thoughts on how it stacks up you’ll have to listen to the show. (I will link to this review - When it is out)
Camp Concentration is one of those novels that doesn’t depend on a story, plot, or narrative drive. It is a vibe novel. I am not against such literary endeavors but they are much less my jam, that a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Told through a series of journal entries, like all novels with this set-up the author is confined to staying in character, and writing with the limitation of a journal. I find it is hard for most authors not to cheat in the first-person narrative. Stephen King is a master at not cheating, his recent hard case crime novel Later, the prose “grew up” with the character.
Considering the concept of this novel I was looking for details to show that the main character was growing smarter in the narrative. This is the story of Louis Sacchetti, a poet in prison for draft resistance who is sent to Camp Archimedes. He is unwilling part of an experiment to increase intelligence through a drug called Pallidine.
“Though opposition is a hopeless task, acquiescence would be worse.”
I don’t really understand why the military would take draft resistors and criminals for this task, except for general dehumanization, and even though the back cover refers to the book as chillingly plausible I don’t think it was. That’s Okay I think the surreal nature is a strength. It doesn’t have to be realistic to comment on the times. I am not sure Robert McNamara could ever in any reality become president it is an interesting fear projected by a late 60s progressive poet/new wave SF writer.
Disch seems to projecting the idea that McNamara was on the verge of taking our country from a conflict in Southeast Asia and a cold war to a global devastating conflict.
“We were sent out of the prison today on a detail to cut down and burn blighted trees. A new Virus, or one of our own, gone astray. The landscape outside the prison is, despite the season, nearly as desolate as that within. The War has devoured the reserves of our affluence and is damaging the fibers of every day.”
I want to say just because it didn’t happen doesn’t make this speculative commentary any less valid or important. The fears of a cold war going hot were a very important part of human survival. We might not be here with the post-nuclear novels and films. Not just because Regan watch the Day After.
At the time it was written to think of Robert McNamara as bloodthirsty and it was a fair position to depict as a heartless American Stalin. I am not sure how hindsight affects this novel considering McNamara’s change of heart documented in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War. Certainly, it changes nothing for the dead on either side of the conflict. He did what he did, Disch’s speculative commentary can only exist on the level of 1967/68’s McNamara.
Camp Concentration also feels like a literary take on the same ground that the Peter Watkins film Punishment Park attacked. The clash of the late 60s progressives culture and pro-war erupted in Chicago at the Democratic national convention. The genre attacked the war in subtle metaphors on Star Trek and not so subtle in novels like Leguin's The Word for World is Forest and Hadleman’s The Forever War.
The novel is not as intense as Punishment Park, a movie that is gut-wrenching for activists to watch. Disch calmly gets into the character of a man writing a journal behind bars. As such the first half of the novel has only hints at Speculative elements and world-building.
“Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known”
Louis Sacchetti is not a part of Robert McNamera’s America and I found myself wondering what that country was like. Disch wants the reader to understand that the characters in the camp have no connection to the outside world or the war. They can’t stop it or affect it. The walls of their mind-expanding doesn’t give them any power to stop the war machine - a very on-the-nose analogy but that is the feeling that was the message Disch was laying down.
Most of the vibes and tones that make the second half of the novel feel Sci-fi are in the reaction to drugs. As Louis and his fellow prisoners become smarter they look for solutions. Like the novel that beat it for the 1969 Hugo Stand on Zanzibar, this novel touches on overpopulation. The prisoners realize the problems are bigger.
I admit I was a little bored in the second half. Louis writes about the downfall of the country and the globalist American power. Making the population into geniuses won’t keep them from having casual sex and spreading, huh what? Wait, that came out of nowhere. I can’t make sense of one thing - maybe it was this reader. Were these projections or were they actually happening in the story?
I was a little unclear towards the end. Thomas Disch is a great writer, and the prose is better than average Science Fiction. He has a point of view and it is getting expressed, I am not sure that makes this a good, or great novel. I like stories. I felt this novel did lots of things well, but I didn’t really feel any story.
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