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Camp Concentration

Camp Concentration

Author: Thomas M. Disch

One of the developments in scientific thinking during the 1960s that new wave writers caught on to was changing ideas about the power of the mind. Much new wave fiction came down to questions of what the mind was capable of achieving. Arthur Koestler, for example, argued that genius was the result of breaking down preconceived categories in the mind, and that notion was the basis for Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration. In a near-future war, America imprisons its conscientious objectors and injects them with a mutated form of syphilis that is designed to open up the mind, the result is that they think more quickly and more flexibly. Unfortunately, a side effect means that they will die in about nine months. The book consists of the diary on one such inmate, which charts a rise to genius and a decline into madness. The similarity to Flowers for Algernon, is obvious, though the influence of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus is more telling and more significant. Why it's on the list: The idea of drugs as both threat and promise, the opening up of the mind and the increasing fracturing of the narrative: there are many familiar aspects of new wave fiction in this novel, yet it is also a powerfully affecting and humane story.