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Author: Thomas M. Disch
Release date: 12 September, 2000
Media: Paperback
ISBN: 0375705465
The novel starts well, in an almost Faulknerian community of farmers, lead by the dominating and deluded fundamentalist patriarch, Anderson, who are trying to maintain their cornfields and animals against this relentless growth, along with alien attempts at 'pest control' (essentially the slaughter of all living beings remaining on Earth). The plot concentrates on what happens to the dynamics of this community when it is decimated by one of these genocidal attacks, and then forced to welcome a charismatic and educated urban survivor, Jeremiah Orville. His revenge on Anderson for killing his partner, is slow and cunning and pits the old patriarch's children against each other and against him, as the devastated group is forced to seek shelter underground in the roots of the Plants themselves.
'The Gencocides' was Disch's first novel and suffers from a common fault of first novels, and of 1960s sf, in having a great concept but being really rather aimless for long stretches (see also Brian Aldiss' 'Hothouse' as another example of this). The characters switch between being a more realistic band of survivors than, for example, those in Stewart's 'Earth Abides' - with some intriguing and challenging interpersonal conflict - to melodramatic and over-cooked. The long passages underground are claustrophobic and tense to begin with, full of dark and squelchy atmosphere, but soon become dull as Disch, rather like the characters themselves, loses the plot.
The novel is redeemed somewhat by a fine, cinematic and depressingly gloomy ending, but, like 'Hothouse', you can't help but think it would have been better as a novella. Sf in general improved as early 1960s superficiality gave way to anger and disappointment with Disch's own extremely grim and disturbing 'Camp Concentration', and the work of Spinrad ('Bug Jack Barron'), Moorcock ('The Cornelius Quartlet'), Ballard ('The Atrocity Exhibition', 'Hi-rise' etc.) and Brunner ('Stand on Zanzibar', 'The Sheep Look Up' etc.). 'The Genocides' is still worth reading as a book that stands on the cusp of this revolution, as the older more complacent sf was faced with this tide of energetic bitterness and loathing. - an Amazon customer review