Polymath poet Tom Disch is also one of the most talented of the "New Wave" of science-fiction writers who emerged in Great Britain (where Disch lived for a time and where he published much of his early fiction and all of his early poetry) in the 1960s. (Others in the group included J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and Michael Moorcock.) This group, along with such American writers of the period as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joanna Russ, all treated science fiction as a serious genre that enabled them to confront subjects ranging from ecology through amorphous gender roles in a postmodernist nuclear age. As a novelist, Disch has written such critically acclaimed volumes as Camp Concentration (1968), 334 (1972), and On Wings of Song (1979), a novel set in a futuristic Iowa that nonetheless reads something like Disch's own portrait of the artist as a young man growing up gay and Catholic in the Midwest.
