hard deadlines

According to reports on BoingBoing and Making Light, science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch committed suicide over the July 4 weekend.

Disch was a brilliant, dark writer. I read his Camp Concentration in college and was absolutely blown away. He was also one of the few sf writers (along with Douglas Adams and Rob Swigart) to create long-form interactive fictions, back in the incunabula of the medium in the days before the Web. I never had a chance to read his interactive novel Amnesia, but those who had praised it highly. Pop culture audiences may know him as the author of the Brave Little Toaster, which had some success in its animated incarnation.

Disch was also an insightful critic. His analysis of the sf field, The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of was the winner of the Hugo Award for nonfiction. It's one of the reference works I keep on the shelf next to me, and I think I'll give it another read and remember one of sf's brilliant lights.

Remembrances on Making Light.