Rating: 
Summary: An Opinionated, Page-Turning Romp Through Science Fiction
Review: Let me begin by stating that I have read very little science fiction in my life. I picked up Thomas Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" primarily because I had read and immensely enjoyed "The Castle of Indolence", his superb collection of essays on "poetry, poets and poetasters". I also was aware of Disch's reputation as a "literary" writer of science fiction, an author who reputedly stood above the pulpy cauldron of a genre often castigated as "low brow", and was interested in his opinion of the significance of science fiction-a significance which is strongly suggested by the subtitle of this book: "How Science Fiction Conquered the World""The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of" is a wide ranging, opinionated romp through science fiction, a book which keeps you turning the pages with an avidity more typical of a horror or suspense novel. Beginning with the claim that science fiction is, at its root, an American genre that originated with Edgar Allen Poe ("our embarrassing ancestor"), Disch propels the reader through nearly two centuries of writing, showing how science fiction has been able to combine genuine visionary power with the most irrational, "lumpen-literature" characteristics of the black-print-screaming tabloid headlines about UFO abductees. In chapter after chapter, Disch renders strong opinions and insightful observations on how science fiction has evolved over the years, how that evolution has affected our view of the world and its possible futures, and how science fiction has been able to appropriate and define political, religious and social perspectives on the world. Along the way, Disch takes on feminism ("Can Girls Play Too? Feminizing Science Fiction"), Republicans ("Republicans on Mars-Science Fiction as Military Strategy"), and, not surprisingly, the unmitigated xenophobic need for an "other" ("The Third World and Other Alien Nations"). The most compelling thing about "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of", however, is that it makes you want to sit down and read some of these science fiction writers-at least if you're like me, and haven't already.
Rating:
Summary: tough love
Review: Mr. Disch, a well regarded science fiction writer, poet, playwright, and critic, here gives us a critical history of the scifi genre that resembles nothing so much as a drive-by shooting. When he's done, the field is lettered with the shattered reputations of the field's hacks (from John Norman to Newt Gingrich), quacks (from L. Ron Hubbard to Whitley Streiber), feminists (Ursula K. LeGuin & company), fascists (Robert Heinlein), technophiles (Greg Egan), proselytizers (Orson Scott Card), and so forth and so on. Among the offenses cited, besides bad writing, are a tendency to pander to the ... fantasies of young men, a willingness to exploit things like UFO crazes and apocalyptic beliefs, extreme right-wing politics, extreme left-wing politics, dumbing down for the mass audience, jargoning up for the academic crowd, employing ludicrous science, jingoism, racism, ... speciesism, etc. Hardly anyone comes off well--himself, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Joe Haldeman and a very few more, plus Edgar Allan Poe gets an ambivalent nod, given credit not only for inventing science fiction but for embodying it entire in his work, both its good and its bad aspects. Mr. Disch is particularly drawn to Poe as perpetrator of hoaxes, a talent he think central to science fiction. In fact, he believes lying to be central to our national character: America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature,
as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe. In Mr. Disch's view, Poe and his successors mastered the art of telling people what they want to believe. And in stories like Mesmeric Revelation and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, he finds Poe to have anticipated nearly every theme that would be developed by subsequent writers: 1. Mesmerism 2. Dreams come true 3. Chip-on-the-shoulder superiority 4. Genuine visionary power 5. Great special effects 6. Sophomoric humor 7. Divine madness Over the course of the book he shows how these themes have been employed for good and ill, by various writers, the overwhelming majority of whom he believes have exploited their readers dreams without living up to the admonition that forms the title of Delmore Schwartz's first collection of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which Mr. Disch alludes to in the title of this book. Too often he finds his subjects dodging responsibility in favor of popularity, easy money, fadishness, and personal political predilections. Inevitably the folks who come off worst here are the fans who let authors get away with this stuff. At best Mr. Disch portrays them as kind of reminiscent of the guys from your high school's A.V. club, with delusions of superpowered children, women who want to be dominated and alien races just waiting to be wiped out. At worst, they're militiamen like those from the Oklahoma City bombing or the members of the Heaven's Gate or Aum Shinrikyo cults. That is, they're totally gullible, susceptible to either homicidal or suicidal suggestion. And always they're the oft-caricatured geeky losers who attend Star Trek conventions. As you can tell by now, this is a very dark vision of science fiction--one of the rare bright spots (according to Mr. Disch anyway) coming when it helped us learn to live with the atom bomb. Equally bleak is his prediction for the future, when movies and television, now that their effects can match our imaginations, take over from books. In the end what keeps us reading, even as he's telling us that most of what we're reading about is junk, is the quality of Mr. Disch's analysis and the sheer bravado with which he attacks his own peers, predecessors, and heirs. There's something here to alienate just about every reader, but the very equal opportunity nature of the drubbings he administers makes it hard to stay mad. If he's laying into an author you like or a political philosophy you admire, have no fear, on the next page he'll have moved on to authors and ideas you loathe. One admires the high moral seriousness to which he summons science fiction, but despairs as he says it's not happened in the past and isn't going to happen in the future. He kind of reminds you of the American colonel in Vietnam who opined: "We had to destroy the village to save it", except that Mr. Disch adds that the village is doomed anyway. This may be too upsetting for scifi fanatics but for the casual fan or the merely curious reader it's an enjoyable performance to behold. GRADE: B-
Rating:
Summary: tough love
Review: Mr. Disch, a well regarded science fiction writer, poet, playwright, and critic, here gives us a critical history of the scifi genre that resembles nothing so much as a drive-by shooting. When he's done, the field is lettered with the shattered reputations of the field's hacks (from John Norman to Newt Gingrich), quacks (from L. Ron Hubbard to Whitley Streiber), feminists (Ursula K. LeGuin & company), fascists (Robert Heinlein), technophiles (Greg Egan), proselytizers (Orson Scott Card), and so forth and so on. Among the offenses cited, besides bad writing, are a tendency to pander to the ... fantasies of young men, a willingness to exploit things like UFO crazes and apocalyptic beliefs, extreme right-wing politics, extreme left-wing politics, dumbing down for the mass audience, jargoning up for the academic crowd, employing ludicrous science, jingoism, racism, ... speciesism, etc. Hardly anyone comes off well--himself, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Joe Haldeman and a very few more, plus Edgar Allan Poe gets an ambivalent nod, given credit not only for inventing science fiction but for embodying it entire in his work, both its good and its bad aspects. Mr. Disch is particularly drawn to Poe as perpetrator of hoaxes, a talent he think central to science fiction. In fact, he believes lying to be central to our national character: America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature,
as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe. In Mr. Disch's view, Poe and his successors mastered the art of telling people what they want to believe. And in stories like Mesmeric Revelation and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, he finds Poe to have anticipated nearly every theme that would be developed by subsequent writers: 1. Mesmerism 2. Dreams come true 3. Chip-on-the-shoulder superiority 4. Genuine visionary power 5. Great special effects 6. Sophomoric humor 7. Divine madness Over the course of the book he shows how these themes have been employed for good and ill, by various writers, the overwhelming majority of whom he believes have exploited their readers dreams without living up to the admonition that forms the title of Delmore Schwartz's first collection of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which Mr. Disch alludes to in the title of this book. Too often he finds his subjects dodging responsibility in favor of popularity, easy money, fadishness, and personal political predilections. Inevitably the folks who come off worst here are the fans who let authors get away with this stuff. At best Mr. Disch portrays them as kind of reminiscent of the guys from your high school's A.V. club, with delusions of superpowered children, women who want to be dominated and alien races just waiting to be wiped out. At worst, they're militiamen like those from the Oklahoma City bombing or the members of the Heaven's Gate or Aum Shinrikyo cults. That is, they're totally gullible, susceptible to either homicidal or suicidal suggestion. And always they're the oft-caricatured geeky losers who attend Star Trek conventions. As you can tell by now, this is a very dark vision of science fiction--one of the rare bright spots (according to Mr. Disch anyway) coming when it helped us learn to live with the atom bomb. Equally bleak is his prediction for the future, when movies and television, now that their effects can match our imaginations, take over from books. In the end what keeps us reading, even as he's telling us that most of what we're reading about is junk, is the quality of Mr. Disch's analysis and the sheer bravado with which he attacks his own peers, predecessors, and heirs. There's something here to alienate just about every reader, but the very equal opportunity nature of the drubbings he administers makes it hard to stay mad. If he's laying into an author you like or a political philosophy you admire, have no fear, on the next page he'll have moved on to authors and ideas you loathe. One admires the high moral seriousness to which he summons science fiction, but despairs as he says it's not happened in the past and isn't going to happen in the future. He kind of reminds you of the American colonel in Vietnam who opined: "We had to destroy the village to save it", except that Mr. Disch adds that the village is doomed anyway. This may be too upsetting for scifi fanatics but for the casual fan or the merely curious reader it's an enjoyable performance to behold. GRADE: B-
Rating: 
Summary: Serious errors of fact mar this book
Review: None of the reviews here have pointed out the serious mistakes Disch makes in trying to defend his thesis that SF began with books from an American man, not a British woman. He states that Mary Shelley's work was privately published with money from her rich in-laws and was only read by the few. Any good reference work on English literature will put this straight: Shelley's work was an enormous commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Her in-laws despised her and after Shelley's death -- which left her poverty stricken, as he'd borrowed heavily against his inheritance -- refused even to help her children. What's more, the story was so popular that various theatre companies in England and America mounted productions; at one point, in 1854 I think it was, there were three competing productions in London alone. A person didn't even have to know how to read to learn about the book and its ideas -- one of these productions was very "penny dreadful" and attracted a most decidedly un-elite audience. One has to ask why Disch distorts the truth so drastically -- I suspect that his later chapter on women's sf, equally distorted and denigrating, just might provide a clue.
Rating:
Summary: An Engrossing Critique Of A Much-Maligned Genre
Review: One of the few volumes of literary criticism I've come across that's actually FUN to read, Disch does an excellent job of disecting the genre's major lietmotifs in this fast-paced & funny volume. He does an excellent job of deflating the pretenses of both left- and right-leaning SF authors, not to mention his direct hits on wack jobs and elitists both in and outside the genre. Disch sometimes tries a little too hard to show you how clever he is, but, as I indicated earlier, his irreverent sense of humor saves the day. Most imporantly, perhaps, he reminds us that "[a]rt is a kind of play, and those who forget how to be playful are likely to produce art that is ever more mature and responsible and ponderous". "Must" reading for anyone interested in science fiction and its influence on our culture.
Rating: 
Summary: Disch is Brilliant
Review: Reading this made me want to read SF books (not randomly but selectively). I assume this was Mr. Disch's goal. I have always enjoyed SF movies but was never a big SF book fan. Mr. Disch makes lucid and even handed statements, and his prose is finely polished and a joy to read. He is funny and I flew through this book. I have never enjoyed reading literary history so much. A good mind with good ideas. Mr. Disch is very modest; barely mentioning his own books. If you decide to explore his SF stuff, check out The Genocides, my personal favorite. Mr. Disch doesn't see a bright future for the genre, and hurls a few lighthearted barbs at deserving targets. He comes off as a true wisdom figure. Mr. Disch praises Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Looking back on the history of SF books, Mr. Disch describes thematic streams, recurring metaphors and tropes, and his judgments are sound and even-handed, but never bland. He admires SF writers who are not lazy about the science they inject into their plots. The analysis of Star Trek is truly original and biting. He sees the Enterprise crew as a bunch of pajama clad office workers who live in a morally transparent universe. Mr. Disch has this to say about good SF writing: "To my mind a "realism of the future" has been the ambition of most good SF writers. The worlds they describe and the events they narrate may have a surreal quality at first glance, but as the story unfolds such surrealities come to have a naturalistic basis in an altered but real world." (Disch p.218)
Rating:
Summary: Disch is Brilliant
Review: Reading this made me want to read SF books (not randomly but selectively). I assume this was Mr. Disch's goal. I have always enjoyed SF movies but was never a big SF book fan. Mr. Disch makes lucid and even handed statements, and his prose is finely polished and a joy to read. He is funny and I flew through this book. I have never enjoyed reading literary history so much. A good mind with good ideas. Mr. Disch is very modest; barely mentioning his own books. If you decide to explore his SF stuff, check out The Genocides, my personal favorite. Mr. Disch doesn't see a bright future for the genre, and hurls a few lighthearted barbs at deserving targets. He comes off as a true wisdom figure. Mr. Disch praises Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Looking back on the history of SF books, Mr. Disch describes thematic streams, recurring metaphors and tropes, and his judgments are sound and even-handed, but never bland. He admires SF writers who are not lazy about the science they inject into their plots. The analysis of Star Trek is truly original and biting. He sees the Enterprise crew as a bunch of pajama clad office workers who live in a morally transparent universe. Mr. Disch has this to say about good SF writing: "To my mind a "realism of the future" has been the ambition of most good SF writers. The worlds they describe and the events they narrate may have a surreal quality at first glance, but as the story unfolds such surrealities come to have a naturalistic basis in an altered but real world." (Disch p.218)
Rating:
Summary: Some will like it; some will hate it; all will respect it
Review: Some readers will very much enjoy this thoughtful and articulate analysis; others will dislike it because Disch takes on some of the sacred cows of science fiction. No objective reader, however, will fail to respect the quality of THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF. I personally am a little more fond of Heinlein, and much less fond of Dick, than Disch appears to be; further, I disagree with his thesis that Poe is the penultimate font from which science fiction as a genre springs. However, in the aggregate, I highly recommend this work to any fan of science fiction who seeks a good book-length history of science fiction coupled with excellent criticism. Disch is not afraid to state his opinions, but he is nevertheless fair and balanced in his presentation.
Rating:
Summary: More Fun Than a Barrel of Space Monkeys
Review: The first thing to say about Thomas M. Disch's The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of (How Science Fiction Conquered the World) is just how flat out entertaining this crazy quilt history of science fiction writing truly is. It is also wonderfully opinionated and sure to upset many science fiction readers, or readers of any kind, beginning with some outrageous and thought provoking words about about dear Edgar Allan Poe and working its controversial way towards the millenium. This book should make one question one's assumptions about why and how one reads a book and that is a good thing. This clever read should also send the reader out to read and re-read some science fiction classics and trash to evaluate for oneself the statements made by Mr. Disch. A wonderful cock-eyed look at science fiction to be avoided only by those afraid of strong opinions and smart writing.
Rating:
Summary: A Recipe for Apoplexy
Review: There are only a few published books that treat science fiction as something worthy of notice and critical evaluation. This book attempts to go even further by trying to prove a hypothesis that science fiction has become so invidiously entangled in the everyday world that is now a given, an everyday component that shapes many of the cultural tropes and the thought processes of Joe Everyman. Disch starts by examining the beginnings of science fiction as a separate literary genre, starting with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He does an excellent job of examining the themes and ideas that Poe originated, making a strong case that Poe should be considered the ancestor of SF, rather than the more commonly cited Shelley. But in his examination of Shelley Disch displays the first evidence that this is not a work of critical evaluation of the first rank, as he dismisses her book merely because "An unread author is no one's intellectual ancestor", ignoring both the possible influence on other writers some seminal works have, commonly read or not, and the fact that Shelley is far from an 'unread author'. This same sloppiness is exhibited in some of his research on other authors, most notably Robert Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin. While he correctly presents the oddity that Heinlein, normally considered a strong conservative, at one point in his life ran on the Democratic ticket for a California State Assembly seat and was heavily involved with EPIC, the socialistic movement championed by Upton Sinclair, he repeats (in multiple places) the gossip that Charles Manson was a Heinlein disciple, something easily disprovable by examining the court records of Manson's trial. Le Guin is lambasted as a militant and underhanded feminist, with little examination of her extraordinary influence and place in the SF world as a strong literary writer whose themes include far more than just the battle of the sexes. In his chapter on religion and SF, once again he seems to be incomplete, showing a lot of material on L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology, but completely ignoring things like the Church of All Worlds, which originated from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and the fact that the two writers were well acquainted with each other and had discussed the practicalities of 'inventing' a new religion. There are places where Disch is insightful, such as his exploration of the idea that the Star Trek societal model can be taken as a restatement of the perfect modern office culture, uni-sexed and culturally blind. But far too often he seems to ride off on his own personal hobby-horses, from UFO adherents to the Heaven's Gate cult to Reagan's SDI initiative, straining desperately to tie these phenomena to the mainstream of science fiction writing. Many of his bald statements caused me to approach a near-apoplectic condition as they were totally contrary to my own knowledge of events and the science fiction field (and I've been reading the stuff for forty-five years), while only a few brought a nod of agreement. In terms of proving his initial thesis, he is only partially successful, mainly succeeding at the lowest denominator level of Hollywood movies and the apathy of the average American to space exploration as 'old hat', but failing miserably at any good criticism of the literary value of science fiction and its influence on other forms of writing and the world at large.
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