Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” goes one of the most idiotic idioms of all time¹ and I (scott manley hadley) refuse to abide by it.

I refused, once again, picking up this 1968 novel by Thomas M. Disch purely on the strength of its cover.

Not due to sleek graphic design (not mind-blowing here), an ice-cold title (again, not mind-blowing – it’s just the words “Concentration Camp” reversed), or the name of the author (I didn’t know his work) but solely due to the presence on that judged cover of two other names: Camp Concentration boasts glowing cover blurbs from the two writers in the SF genre whose work I have come to enjoy the most: BOTH Samuel R.2 Delany AND Ursula K. Le Guin.

Obviously, author blurbs fly around like literary attempts at karmic manipulation, a “the love you take is equal to the love you make” type quid pro quo, so there’s no inherent guarantee that this has much meaning beyond expectations of mutual back-slapping.

BUT both of those writers are people who, over the course of their careers, pointedly went out of their way to not universally praise and gush about the work of their peers.

Both of them are writers who saw themselves as critics as well as creatives, and though maybe they – like many authors – flooded the world with blurbs in the 1960s, it’s not something either did en masse later in their career, so I chose to view the approval here of Disch as something meaningful, something indicative of quality.

I gambled. I did. And I very (kinda) won…

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Camp Concentration is set in an alternative present/near-future America of the 1960s in which perpetual overseas war has become normalised.

An academic and poet, Louis Sacchetti, has been sent to prison as a conscientious objector, and a few months into a five year prison term at a pretty rough prison, is pulled aside after some supposedly routine injections and sent – effectively blindfolded – to a new facility.

Here, though he is still under lock and key and unable to escape, food and comfort and intellectual stimulation is plentiful, and Sacchetti is surrounded by other prisoners who seem to be his intellectual equal, though often mispronounce words in a way that screams “autodidact” to him, rather than “educated”.

The deal for Sacchetti is that he can spend his sentence here, rather than in a grim “normal” prison, provided he documents his experiences in a public journal, to be read by the guards, prison managers and – of course  – the mostly unseen scientists that surround him.

Yes, scientists…

Why is everyone here, in this gilded – yet high security – underground prison? Because, yes, all of the prisoners have been infected with an experimental virus that creates supremely high intelligence in the victim, though also causes them to die, agonisingly, in about nine months.

The prisoners – egged on by their supervising military scientists – experiment with cultural, biological and intellectual philosophies, learning and writing and creating and bouncing off each other.

Halfway through, of course, comes the revelation that Sacchetti, too, is one of the infected, though his own sense of self-important intellectual superiority meant that he didn’t notice his own capacities for thought and analysis rising, and as an unfit and generally unwell bibliophile and glutton, he barely noticed his own beginning, slow, physical decline…

Is it possible to find a cure, with the greatest minds of the world (the Americas?) working together to do so?

Is it possible for these minds to invent military technologies or techniques that could bring an end to perpetual war?

Is it possible for this virus to be contained just in the convicts in the facility, when it is transmitted sexually and all of the prisoners have gained intellect and charm and the staff are susceptible and isolated and horny and aren’t locked down anywhere near as effectively as the administrators would like to pretend..?

Inventions – artistic and physical – arise and illnesses collapse bodies though not minds…

Philosophies are discussed and debated and plans and expectations alter and collapse, too…

It’s engaging, it’s exciting, and it offers an interesting time capsule philosophy on how 1960s Americans viewed the potential of a sexually transmitted epidemic (which would, of course, happen a little over a decade later…).

It’s both an entertaining thought exercise, but also a grimly believable fable about the risks and dangers wartime governments would knowingly visit on the populations they had decided were superfluous.

A great read. Brief, thorough, troubling… A whole worldview and numerous lives in about 150 pages. Well worth a read, if you stumble on a copy…

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1. There isn’t time to read them all. There isn’t time to read opinions about them all. There are moments when one must decide, bluntly, quickly, immediately, if one is going to read or not read a book, or even acquire or not acquire it. Often, all you have is the cover to hand. You have to, you have to, you have to, judge books by their covers. To do anything else, in my opinion, is impossible. Impractical. Untenable. It’s also usually applied to people, in terms of “don’t presume that just because someone seems like a dickhead that they actually are,” but with people you also have to remember that, most of the time, someone who seems like a dickhead, usually is. If you can read people, you can read book covers. You cannot befriend everyone. ↩︎
2. “Chip” ↩︎