Fun with Your New Head by Thomas M. Disch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This collection is nothing near the quality of Camp Concentration, but does show some of the budding promise of this New Wave speculative writer. Overall, none of the stories in this collection really stand out in comparison to today’s speculative fiction envelope pushers, but for their time the stories were likely a little more edgy. At least Disch manages to deal with more inner-space than outer-space, exploring the psychological aspects of speculative fiction more than the technobable popular in the decade before this book’s publication. I’ve been looking for anthologies that fit into the category of ‘science fiction and fantasy for people who don’t like science fiction and fantasy’ and I don’t believe this quite qualifies. It’s a good collection if considered within the domain of its contemporaries, but Disch is not quite Harlan Ellison. This is worth the read if you’re interested in the big change in speculative fiction that hit in the sixties, but won’t do much for the casual reader. For better works of his from this time period, see Camp Concentration and The Prisoner.



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